Due to the increasing population at our school, student athletes have been raised to a higher competition level in recent years. Although this means that these students athletes have to be pushed more to compete with 4A West athletes, there is a greater problem when it comes to participants in each sport.

With more people attending our school it still does not create a direct correlation with the number of students who take part on a team. This means as people join the school, they aren’t joining the sports teams. This is especially true when it comes to the swim team in my experience.

When we compete against teams with twenty or thirty more swimmers than us, it doesn’t matter how good our swimmers are because other teams can beat us by just pure numbers when it gets to the regional and state level. For example, if we have one swimmer in each event, then other teams would still be able to take the remaining places and points while only one of our swimmers did the event.

In sports that don’t have specific positions like swimming, track and cross country, the size of the team matters a lot in the times you get in order to qualify for the state meet. The top amount in regionals might advance to states but the last person’s time is set as the standard for the next qualifying time for the next year which sets a high bar.

This makes it very difficult for many of the athletes on any team to reach the final stage of competition after all the work put in during the season. It is understood that with more students than there is more of a possibility that more people will join the team or will be more skilled due to the larger pool of students. This system of classifying schools into different competing groups can be reconstructed to take into account the size of the team in some cases.