12/20/13 – Limitation of Seasons, Rosters, and Regular Season Competition Structure

December 20, 2013 Athletic Department Blog Updates

The KHSAA is excited to announce that we currently have 107 schools participating in high school bowling.  With the growth of bowling also come growing pains.  We hope that this and future communications is helpful to students, coaches and administrators involved in all aspects of the sport activity.

We know that it is very important to schools to be consistent across all KHSAA sport activities. Upon review of the competition rules of both bowling and other KHSAA activities, and due to questions we have received here at the office, we would like to share the following interpretations.  This may be different than what you have done or been told in the past.

First, Bylaw 23, Limitation of Seasons for sport activities is different than in the interpretation that is given to the sports.  For instance, a JV bowling team would like to participate in a tournament on February 1, 2014.  This is after the postseason begins for the varsity team. Because the rules, in regards to bowling, do not limit the number of contest per season the JV team could be allowed to participate as KHSAA rules do not prohibit their participation.

In the past, the interpretation on rosters has been that once a student is on a team, that student must remain on that team throughout the entire season.  This is not accurate.  Per the competition rules for all sport activities, the rosters are not locked until the first day of the postseason. Therefore, if player A played on team A at in the first contest of the year, player A would be allowed to play on team B in the season contest of the year.  This would allow schools to field multiple teams (example a girls team and a boys/mixed team) throughout the season. During the postseason, the roster must be locked and player A would only be allowed to compete on either team A or team B for the duration of the postseason tournament.

Along similar lines, we have used the competition structure outlined in the implementation guide as the structure for all regular season dual matches.  As all bowlers know, the structure for a match or a tournament can be designed in many different ways.  We ask that schools who can continue to use this regular season structure continue to do so, but it is allowed to deviate from this structure during the regular season, especially to accommodate new and growing teams.  For example. school A has enough students to field both a girls and a boys team, but school B only has only enough students to field a boys/mixed team.  School A is allowed (and should be notified ahead of time) to restructure their team into a boys/mixed team or two boys/mixed teams and compete with school B. Be mindful that during the postseason, the structure indicated in the competition rules will be used.