Plan to add games to South Dakota basketball season doesn't get support from ADs

Apr. 17—MITCHELL — The South Dakota high school basketball regular season is staying at 20 games.

A proposal to increase the number of allowed regular-season contests to 22 games for both girls and boys basketball failed by a 89-23 vote at the South Dakota Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association spring conference.

The original proposal was drafted by Rapid City Christian activities director and head boys basketball coach Kyle Courtney and was approved by a 4-2 vote from the South Dakota High School Activities Association basketball advisory committee in February. It was the only proposal out of six presented to the advisory committee to reach the SDIAAA conference.

The vote from the SDIAAA members is non-binding. The SDHSAA Board of Directors will take that feedback and input from SDHSAA staff into consideration before voting on the proposal during their April 22-23 board meeting. Proposed sport rule changes need to pass two rounds of SDHSAA Board of Directors voting before being formally approved.

Class AA schools voted 15-3 against the plan to allow up to 22 games. Class A schools voted 34-6 against it, and Class B schools opposed it 40-14.

Even still, Dell Rapids Superintendent Donavan DeBoer, the advisory committee's administrator representative, predicted the proposal would receive minimal support among administrators once it reached the SDIAAA conference.

"I would be more apt to vote for 18 games than 22 games," DeBoer said on Feb. 4. "I don't think the superintendents would support spending two more nights on buses with referees and workers in the landscape of where we're at dollars-wise in education right now."

Asked to gauge the proposal's popularity among the state's activities directors at the SDIAAA conference, Mitchell High School AD Cory Aadland replied plainly: "Not very."

Among Class AA schools, only three schools supported the 22-game proposal: Pierre, Rapid City Stevens and Sioux Falls Lincoln.

In Aadland's view, there were two main elements working against the proposal. To start, Aadland echoed DeBoer's sentiments about spending more on athletics.

"Financially, it would be tough to add games and incur more expenses during a time when there's not really any extra money to go around as it is," Aadland said.

Additionally, the existing season can get compressed when scheduling changes become a factor. Rescheduling one game is fairly easy, but each one thereafter compounds the challenge, according to Aadland.

According to the proposal's rationale, South Dakota plays fewer games than almost any other state, and even when compared to states with similar numbers of games, South Dakota has a shorter postseason. Under the proposal's guidelines, it would have been optional, not mandatory, for schools to add contests up to the 22-game limit.

Mitchell boys basketball coach Ryker Kreutzfeldt acknowledged the difficulties and agreed that now is not the right time to expand the schedule. However, in a world where the schedule extended to 22 games, Kreutzfeldt said he would like to see those games not affect the seed-point calculation. In his eyes, that change would afford programs a little extra scheduling flexibility and encourage more interesting matchups, whether cross-class with Class AA teams involved or with out-of-state schools at events like the Hoop City Classic.