Grand Island Senior High cancels varsity girls basketball schedule this year

GISH announced this week that it will cut the 2024-25 varsity season for girls basketball.

Nebraska School Activities Association has ranked GISH as the largest school in Class A.

The school does not have any junior or senior student athletes going out to the sport. Planning for the future of the program, it was brought before the GISH girls basketball coaching staff as well as the activities office and the staff and administration of the district to devise some venues how to support such program, the school stated in its release. During each stage of program development, communication with middle school and high school parents and student athletes occurred to remind everyone that we are committed to the program.

Jon Dolliver oversees basketball at the Nebraska School Activities Association, NSAA for short.

Of course I understand that making that call was not the simplest decision the Grand Island administration and their school had to make. Therefore you tend to empathize with those kids because you are only allowed so many chances to play sports or games in high school,” continued Dolliver.

He said that opponents for Grand Island games are searching for other teams to face.

A press release noted that the goal was to build up Young Home Grown Talent through reserves and freshman levels rather than competiting with a varsity team full of Freshmen and Sophomores.

Kathryn Langrehr and her staff will stay with the program and therefore there is no worries in this field.

We are also fully supportive of this program The program, you know. And it’s because of our dedication to building girls basketball at Grand Island — and our state — that we are implementing this difficult but creative move,” said Chris Ladwig, GISH Activities Director. Our goals include as well as can be started to as giving the best student athlete experience that we possibly can to our kids. At the moment we cannot afford to support an upper-class varsity team without the necessary number of students. Therefore, our major emphasis will be to do more for the improvement of our freshman and sophomore players as well as effectively make an organized ‘full court press’ campaign in the redevelopment of youth programs within our fraternity. For the record, we support Coach Langrehr and her vision for this program completely.”

Putting into the broader context, the decline in numbers among high schools girls basketball organized programs is a challenge that many schools have encountered.

“Sadly, we have observed this not only in this region of the state.” Matt Fisher, GIPS Superintendent said in the press release. Many high school boys basketball teams teams at all classes are struggling to come by girl counterparts. Even as painful as it is to not offer a varsity schedule for a year we support our activities department and girls basketball coaching staff when they suggest that we need to provide more resources and support for the long term development of the program. In this case, that means taking a step-back so we may develop our student athletes the right way. We still stand for girls basketball and for students’ stays.”

As stated by the NSAA schools across the state have had troubles with filling football and girl’s basketball squads in recent years which resulted in several cases of cancellation. Omaha Benson High School said it would pull out of the rest of the football season earlier this week. Millard South was leading Lincoln High School 62-0 at halftime last weekend in a football match and Lincoln High School declined to continue with the game in the second half.

Its hard to believe that in the 2022-23 girls basketball season this school Omaha Bryan High School does not even have a varsity team either. This year, Bryan is jointly with Omaha Buena Vista High School to come up with a varsity girls basketball team.

High school sports have evolved in the last decade according to Dolliver.

“I think some of that has to do with club sports,” he said. ‘Specifically, there is a lot of segmentation in kids where more and more a child is involved in playing certain ones but not other ones of sports.’