With the addition of flag football and an increase in sports participation overall, many feel overcrowding on the practice fields has become a recurring problem. More teams practicing requires more space, which may lead to an uncomfortable environment and creates the problem of when each team can practice, where they can practice and what is the solution.
In previous years, the number of sports using the main field was limited, and each sport had their given day to use the space. Football head coach Nelson Gifford explained that in recent years, the increase in participation has increased the time required for each sport, which creates overlap.
“Before, stadium events were limited to twice a week, field hockey playing there once a week, usually on either a Monday or a Wednesday. Then you had football playing on a Friday,” Gifford said. “Now, you’ve got field hockey playing, you’ve got football playing and you also have flag football playing one if not two days a week currently this year.”
Marching band is one of the afterschool activities that is affected by the change in field usage. Marching band participant senior Brianna Bell shared that the marching band has struggled due to a lack of space.
“We need a specified field to practice our dots and with how many people are back there,” Bell said. “We can’t have that specified field anymore, and we can’t practice our shows as well as we’d like to.”
Marching band is an activity where the players need to have a specific setting and organization to follow in order to practice properly. Bell noted that due to the overcrowding, they cannot have that proper practice to learn drills and coordination for their shows.
“Since we don’t have that specified field anymore, we have to resort to either practicing basics or just practicing music, which is taking a bit of a toll on our schedule,” Bell said. “We’ve tried taking another field and taping it so that the coordinates are kind of similar. The quality of our rehearsal has definitely dropped as a result of all this.”
While marching band is often viewed as an activity rather than a sport, the physical and mental tax it takes on its members can be equally demanding. Bell shared that marching band is just as exhausting as any other sport because of the long and tedious practices and should be treated as such by other athletes.
“It can be as physically demanding as sports, coming from somebody who has done wrestling, which is argued to be the most difficult high school sport,” Bell said. “I would argue that it should have the same amount of respect as the sports do.”
Additionally, marching band participant junior Lukas Leu expressed how the marching band relies on the lines painted on the field to be able to follow their coordinates. Other sports also require these lines, such as the football team, resulting in sports competing over who gets to practice using the main field.
“In marching band, we do a bunch of formations and their coordinates. We don’t just make up the shapes” Leu said. “It correlates with all the yard lines, all the hashes, so we physically need a field to practice on. Since football also needs one, we can’t really both practice on the same field at the same time.”
The overlap of teams practicing does not affect all sports teams from their standard routines. Field hockey coach Laura Jones shared that the overcrowding in the backfield does not have much effect on the field hockey team during practice due to their lack of requirement for the main field.
“We are in a situation that no one else uses our field, so we’re actually not as affected by it as others,” Jones said. “Our field is painted specifically for field hockey. The flag football lines out here are new, but otherwise, no one else uses this field, so we don’t have a conflict.”
There is the possibility of some sports practicing at different hours. Cheerleader junior Sierra Sato, however, believes the change would negatively impact the cheer team due to availability and dependence on attendance.
“There would be a lot of people that wouldn’t be able to be at practice, and because cheer is so much of a team sport, when you’re missing one person, a whole stunt or pyramid can’t go,” Sato said.
Gifford shared that a solution to overcrowding is the addition of lines on fields that more sports can use since they rely on the field markings.
“Especially now that we’ve added lines to what was once solely the soccer and field hockey practice field – so now that we’ve added lines there – both football and band can be on those fields,” Gifford said. “Now that that’s done, we’re in a really good spot.”