At Camas High School (CHS), student athletes are participating more so than ever. This poses both positive and negative effects due to the amount of participants.
Students who compete for CHS can be enrolled in any of the four high schools within the Camas School District, including Discovery High School, Hayes Freedom High School, Camas Connect Academy and CHS. With all four high schools competing for CHS, that means about 2400 students are able to compete bearing the CHS name.
CHS competes at a very high level in their sports. This increases the importance of having non-cut sports; any student can participate and be a part of the school regardless of skill.
“We want to create opportunities for kids to participate in sports without having cuts as part of that process,” CHS Athletic DirectorStephen Baranowski said.
Track and field currently has a little over 250 students participating in their program, with both boys and girls rosters combined. This is the highest number of student participants in program history.
“We want everyone who is interested to be a part of the program,” boys track and friend head coach Christ Butler said.
Both Skyridge middle school and Liberty middle school feed into the CHS track and field program.
With 250 students participating in the track and field program, the amount of space can be limited. During practice the coaches stay vigilant and coordinate while there.
“For distance, varsity athletes do three track workouts a week, then two easy runs and for JV [junior varsity] athletes it’s the opposite,” CHS distance runner Eva McGeachy said.
Along with sprinters and distance runners, field athletes use a big portion of the facilities including the following events:, javelin, discus, shot- put, high- jump, pole- vault and more.
Track and Field has seven paid coaches and seven volunteer coaches to help run their program successfully and with minimal bumps in the road.
Girls tennis also has been facing space issues; there are 112 students on the girls tennis roster and only eight courts available.
The tennis coaches have come up with a “two- practice” schedule to accommodate for higher level tennis players and the students that are just playing for fun.
Varsity and JV practice right after school withand there’s around 28 girls that attend. The rest of the girls tennis team attends the second practice.
“The most difficult part is matches because C team girls have to wait until around 7:00 pm to play and it’s often intra-squad,” girls tennis co-assistant Hailey Kicker said.
The numbers for spring sports are still being solidified. According to Baranowski, it could be the highest participation year for sports at CHS.
“If there’s ways just to get kids involved, we just want to say yes…and make it a good experience for everybody,” Baranowski said.
