Greg Rosenhagen, Conway Springs High School athletic director, speaks of a girl, a freshman, who has a Monday schedule comparable to a 30-year-old corporate climber with children to feed.
She starts her morning with weight training at 6:30 a.m and lifts until 8 a.m. She goes home for breakfast.
Then it's driver's education at 10 a.m. until noon. After lunch its volleyball camp from 1 to 4 p.m. where she then goes to summer softball practice.
Monday evening is open volleyball gym night going from 6:30 to 8 p.m.
That's Monday. Then there's Tuesday, where there is basketball and a softball game to attend to on top of everything else. It's not so bad at Conway Springs as some schools where a policy was enacted to prevent sports from coinciding with the other.
Welcome to summer 2009, where a new Kansas State High School Activities Association rule, has allowed coaches unlimited access to their players until July 19.
And it's a story being echoed in every school in the state of Kansas.
Student-athletes are seeing their summers evaporate into a torrid number of practices and summer games.
"I hate it," Rosenhagen said. "When does a kid get a chance to be a kid, anymore?"
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Some would argue this is nothing new. Summers have always been filled with sporting activities in some variety — at least in the modern era.
Baseball players have been known to play up to 80 to 90 games a summer for at least two decades.
Even so, for years now, the Kansas State High School Activities Association has had the most restrictive summer coaching rules in the Midwest region. Up until this summer, the KSHSAA rules stipulated in football, volleyball or basketball high school coaches could only work with a certain number of athletes throughout the summer. A coach could only instruct their school teams in small numbers: three players in basketball, four in volleyball, five in eight-man football and six in 11-man football.
But the rules were ripe with controversy. Oklahoma, nor Missouri, had such rules enacted, and as a result Kansas kids were a step behind their out-of-state counterparts when it came to college recruiting. Notable figures as former Kansas University head coach Roy Williams was a staunch opponent of the rules.
But the KSHSAA remained steadfast. That is until last fall when the KSHSAA Board of Directors voted 42 to 28 to make significant changes to the rules. (See the rules in related story).
Now high school students in Kansas are like those in Oklahoma and Missouri.
The new policy is getting mixed reviews.
"The small schools hate it, the big schools love it," Rosenhagen said. "But the big schools have the athletes to specialize."
As for the kids themselves?
"Some kids love it. Some kids hate it," Rosenhagen said. "But from what I'm hearing from the students, most of them hate it."
David Hughes, who has successfully guided both his girls basketball and football teams to a Class 1A State Championship game, hates the new rules.
"It used to be in a school our size (Class 1A) that we would do little in the summer because we had farm kids," Hughes said. "Farming was the best off-season workout program because kids would be baling hay, running cattle, just exercising constantly doing farm work."
But the problem now is, the small schools know longer have the number of farm kids available and the number of athletic children have diminished significantly.
Thus workout programs were instilled even in the smallest of schools.
Now with the lack of rules, the competition for a students' time at South Haven has become way too intense, Hughes said. As a result, Hughes has pulled back the reins. He won't increase the summer workout program in football or girls basketball because of wheat harvest, summer baseball/softball and other activities.
In fact, South Haven may be playing less. Traditionally, Hughes held his summer camps in late July. But the new rules stipulate no camps could be held during that period.
"It really has caused us a lot of problems," he said. "We can't hold a camp in the middle of wheat harvest."
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Not everybody is against the new rules.
Wellington head girls basketball coach Kevin Hackerott loves it.
Hackerott, who is in his second year as WHS coach and his first year here, said the new rules has freed him up to implement his program effectively. He has not only instilled a Power Strength, Quickness program specifically for the girls, but he he has had his one-week camp and is coaching a significant number of varsity players on a MAYB summer basketball team.
He said it has allowed the girls to play teams in the Class 6A and 5A level.
"I know it has helped the girls," Hackerott said. "I try not to be too rigid of a taskmaster during the summer, but they are getting to know what I expect of them."
And then there is Wellington head football coach Linn Hibbs, who has been running a tight ship in Wellington for 14 years and has the state championship trophies to prove his success.
For years, Hibbs has said there is hypocrisy running through the sport with the summer rules. Some coaches would adhere to them. Others did not. He would go to 7-on-7 camps and see some 5A-6A coaches on the field with their own players, blatantly disregarding the rules — and nobody was doing anything about it.
"I always felt the rule was ineffective because it wasn't enforced," Hibbs said. "If people were going to abuse the rules, why have them?"
Now that new rules are in place, Hibbs still has mixed feelings coaches are going to push to hard.
For him, he is not going to change the amount of time students spend with the program during the summer except for 7-on-7 drills with other schools on Monday evenings running through June.
PSQ workouts will remain the same, just change in variety. Student athletes are urged to come in at 6:30 to 8:30 a.m., as always, but football drills will now be incorporated with the conditioning.
"We have to walk a fine line as coaches," Hibbs said. "We don't want to fall behind other schools when it comes to conditioning and summer workouts. But we also don't want to ruin a kid's summer either.
"When it becomes August and the kids are already tired of football, then we coaches have pushed too hard."
Wellington, Kan. —
