About six weeks ago, I went to a high school softball game at Fremont High. A stone’s throw away, the baseball team also had a home game.

Around the fourth inning of the softball game, a girls lacrosse game started on the turf football field. There was also a boys tennis match happening on the complete other side of the school’s campus.

Before the softball game, the school’s athletic trainer, Jared Romero, was taping a softball player’s arm, then left to check on tennis, came back later with a bag of ice to give to someone at baseball, then went to lacrosse.

It was a typically busy afternoon of spring sports. We’re adding another sport to this mix?

Backing up a bit, the UHSAA Board of Trustees voted in March to add boys volleyball as a sanctioned sport starting in the 2023-24 school year with competition beginning in the spring 2024 season.

Let me be very clear: sanctioning boys volleyball is great for the kids, the coaches, the parents and everyone involved with the sport who’s worked so hard to get it sanctioned.

Boys volleyball organizers have labored for years to get the sport sanctioned. They watched as the UHSAA board sanctioned lacrosse (2017), girls wrestling (2019) and competitive cheerleading (2021), wondering when, or if, boys volleyball would get that distinction.

It was up for a vote in May 2020, but sanctioning was postponed because of uncertainties in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2021, a motion to sanction boys volleyball failed 8-5. The dissenting voters said it would put too much stress on an already stressed system of school funding, supervision, athletic trainers, bus drivers and facilities.

Finally this March, boys volleyball was approved for sanctioning and while that’s good for athletes and organizers, it’s impossible to talk about boys volleyball without mentioning how adding another spring sport is unsustainable in the current landscape.

Boys volleyball will be the 11th spring sport in the state compared to six in the winter and eight in the fall. The month of May is, has been and will be one of the busiest on the prep sports calendar.

In the recently completed spring sports playoffs season, games began April 29 with the first round of the 3A and 2A boys soccer state tournament and ended May 28 with the final games of the 6A and 5A baseball championship series.

In the spring, there are five separate classifications for each of baseball, softball and boys soccer, 12 classes of track and field (boys and girls), six lacrosse classes (boys and girls), six girls golf classes (plus 1A boys golf) and four boys tennis classes.

From Monday, May 9, to Saturday, May 28, there was a state tournament contest at a neutral site (meaning the UHSAA directly supervises it instead of the home school) every single day except the Sundays or, in other words, on 18 of 21 total days.

Now add one more sport to the mix.

The UHSAA Board of Trustees voted 10-4 to approve sanctioning boys volleyball. The board picked the spring because of easier access to officials.

Three of the four ‘no’ votes came from the 6A and 5A voting bloc who knew firsthand the kind of strain it will place on their schools’ administrators, athletic directors and athletic trainers.

On any given week in the spring all over the state, there are home sporting events at least three days of the week, but really it’s closer to four or five days per week.

Schools already toil in a strained system juggling where administrators, athletic directors and trainers are going on a daily basis, not to mention lining up buses, facilities, officials and, oh yeah, let’s hope it doesn’t pour rain and throw a wrench into the delicate dance of spring sports scheduling.

The UHSAA board didn’t discuss moving a spring sport to another season during the meeting in which it sanctioned boys volleyball, though that’s been a topic of discussion ever since.

The reality is at least one sport, or maybe two or three, need to move to fall or winter to balance things out.

Start with moving boys tennis from the spring to the fall. There are plenty of tennis courts at schools, you can stagger practices and, as a former high school tennis player myself, fall and summer weather is better than spring weather for tennis.

After that it gets tricky. Girls golf seems easy to move to the fall; however, the UHSAA just lowered the maximum golf contest limitation from 14 to 10.

That’s in part because, since the start of the pandemic, golf has seen huge growth recreationally and in the school ranks. As a result, it’s squeezing space on courses and putting more wear and tear on those courses that are managed in perpetual drought conditions.

There’s been talk about moving boys soccer to the fall, but schools rejected that idea in a survey.

It also makes sense to move either boys or girls lacrosse to the fall, but whichever one you move, you’ll get pushback from football, girls soccer or likely both because of constraints on turf space and because those sports sometimes share the same student-athletes.

There’s probably more that can be done to reduce the spring logjam: higher qualifying standards to make the state track meet two days long instead of three, doubleheaders on Saturdays and one game on Monday for the first two rounds of 6A/5A/4A baseball and softball tournaments (best-of-three series) instead of one game Saturday and one, possibly two, the following Monday.

But moving sports around in the year is a stopgap solution. The problems regarding the availability of supervisors, athletic trainers and whatnot is rooted in a lack of personnel in the schools.

School districts with 6A and 5A schools need to hire more people, whether that’s another athletic director, athletic trainer or someone part-time to be a jack-of-all-trades. The perpetual roadblock to hiring more people: money.

Right now, the path schools are on is leading and will continue to lead to burnout — overall, not even just in sports, but that’s a whole other conversation. Adding another set of tasks to an unsustainable situation is, well, unsustainable.

But in this realm, maybe it’s good that the board sanctioned boys volleyball. If the board waited for the “perfect moment” to sanction it, we could wait another 10 years,

Maybe this is what forces some long-overdue changes in the school hallways.

Connect with reporter Patrick Carr via email at pcarr@standard.net, on Twitter @patrickcarr_ or on Instagram @standardexaminersports.

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