I think this is a much bigger issue than Cheyenne South, and frankly, none of it is particularly surprising to me.
I officiated high school sports when I lived in Wyoming, and while I primarily officiate NCAA basketball and football these days, I'm still pretty connected to the prep scene. Having lived in Wyoming, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and now Georgia, I've watched this become an increasingly common problem across the country.
School choice, open enrollment, recruiting (both formal and informal), private schools, and now NIL have fundamentally changed the landscape of high school athletics. The days of simply playing for your neighborhood school are increasingly behind us, particularly in larger communities where families have options. Kids want to win, parents want exposure, and coaches want talent. I'm not necessarily blaming any of them for making those decisions, but the consequences are pretty predictable.
Look at Millard South in Nebraska. They have two Nebraska football commits who transferred from out of state to play their senior seasons together. Think about that for a second. We're talking about a public high school attracting established Division I prospects from across state lines. I'm not suggesting anything improper happened, but it's a pretty remarkable illustration of where high school athletics are headed.
And it's not just football. You see similar dynamics in basketball, where AAU connections, relationships between coaches, and the promise of exposure can influence where kids end up playing.
The unfortunate reality is that this creates a cycle that's incredibly difficult for struggling programs to escape. Successful programs attract talent, which produces more success, which attracts more talent. Meanwhile, schools without that established culture struggle to retain athletes, become less competitive, and eventually reach a point where they're struggling to field teams altogether.
What's particularly interesting is that national high school sports participation is actually at record levels. So it's not necessarily that kids have stopped playing sports. It's that opportunities and talent are becoming increasingly concentrated.
I'm certainly not suggesting Cheyenne South's problems are exclusively attributable to recruiting or school choice. Demographics, enrollment boundaries, resources, coaching, and institutional culture all deserve consideration. And I wouldn't accuse East or Central of improperly recruiting without evidence, though it wouldn't shock me.
But when a program has lost 64 consecutive games, it's hard to imagine that taking a year off from varsity competition solves the underlying problem.
At some point, I think we have to acknowledge that America has created an environment where high school athletics increasingly resemble college athletics, yet we still expect every public school to compete on a relatively level playing field.
That ship sailed a long time ago. Cheyenne South is hardly the first example, and I suspect it won't be the last.
