Missing Sports?

At WRMS, we have the opportunity to play sports for the first time for a school team. WRMS offers football, cheer, tennis, cross country, wrestling, track, basketball, and volleyball. However, there are several sports that are missing, such as baseball, softball, swimming, golf, soccer, and dance. The high school has these sports, so why doesn’t the middle school?

Alea Colley, 8th grader on the Champions team, agrees that this is a problem. “The variety of sports is limited,” said Colley. In a survey of WRMS students, it was clear that students want more sports at the middle school. One benefit to adding more sports means more kids can get involved, and current sports, like football, won’t be as crowded. It would also encourage people to keep their grades up, because you have to have be passing at least three classes to be able to play. One very popular answer to the question, what sport should be added to middle school was soccer. Soccer is a fall sport for boys and a spring sport for girls. 

Many WRMS students play soccer, but according to Mr. Chesmore, the athletic director and 7th grade principal, there’s a big problem with this. If we were to add soccer at WRMS, we wouldn’t have any competitors unless other schools also added soccer. “Emporia added soccer thinking it would be great and it’s gonna get their kids involved because it’s a sport that’s popular, so they added it, but no other league schools had soccer so scheduling was really difficult for them,” Chesmore said, “they travel from Wichita to Kansas City just to play other schools.” 

If you wanted to add a sport to WRMS, Mr. Chesmore said, “I think we have to take into consideration the quality of competition or kids that are interested in it. Those types of things all have to come into consideration.” Depending on the sport, more schools would have to add that sport or we will have no competition in our league. 

Many people want more sports and think it is simple but as you can tell, there are many problems but it could be a good idea to get more kids involved in the school. 

As student journalists who researched this topic over the last few weeks, here are our thoughts:

Jackson Noller: “I think that adding more sports would be a great idea, but it would be very hard to incorporate the sports when no other school has those sports.”

Jolie Workman: “I think adding more sports is a great idea. I would have lots of fun attending the games, and I think if we got other schools involved we could make this happen.”

Miles Cavitte: “Even though there would be struggles, I think we could find a solution and add sports so kids can play sports with the same people that they will next year. For example, with baseball, kids could form a team in 7th grade and then play again in 8th grade and keep going into high school.”