Kansas high school ‘dead week’ just ended, but athletes could use much more

"Dead Week" allows middle- and high-school athletes some time away from summer practice. (Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)

I was talking to a high school student this week who said he was having trouble getting together with a friend during the summer.

“They have practice each day at 9 a.m., and they don’t finish up until about 1 p.m.,” he said. “And then they are so tired that they really don’t want to do anything.”

Summer — for high school athletes — is full. Volleyball weightlifting. Cross-country mileage. Soccer kick-arounds. Football two-a-days. Basketball team camp. Most of it under the watchful eye of a coach’s pivotal judgment.

Most parents agree that team placements for the next year are vastly influenced by summertime attendance — unless your kiddo is the indispensable star. I am writing this as my son practices a half-mile away for a team tournament this weekend.

However, last week ended the one-week period each summer that Kansas high schools enforce a break from school athletics and activities. The Kansas governing body of everything from football to bowling, from scholars bowl to debate, requires seven days off. This year , those dates were July 1 through July 7.

In a flash of branding that never was going to stick, the Kansas State High School Activities Association calls this “Summer Moratorium Week.” When I mentioned those word choices, someone said it sounds like a grandparent had died.

Naturally, everyone involved in high school sports calls it “dead week” instead. (Would it have been that hard to call it Pause Week? Or maybe Get-Off-My-Back-Tyrannical-Coach-Week?)

To think that coaches would need to be required to give students a week off from amateur sports each summer is terrifying. The bylaw’s very existence shows that some coaches were happy to program daily team activities from summer day one until school resumes in August. A summer like that is not a break at all.

During KSHSAA’s dead week , “there shall be no school related athletic activities. During this time, coaches (licensed teacher coaches and coach aides employed by member schools) shall be prohibited from engaging in any type of activity involving student athletes whether it be practice, training, weight lifting, conditioning, competition or travel.”

The bylaw anticipates that coaches might simply require the team’s upperclassmen to schedule team activities. So, it continues, “All member school athletic facilities will be closed during this period to school personnel and students grades 7-12.” So, students can’t use the school’s gym, weight room or soccer fields.

In Kansas, students can attend camps away from school as long as their coaches aren’t involved.

Kansas makes the week as brief as possible. How is it possible to make the week brief? By requiring that the dead week overlap with the Fourth of July holiday, KSHSAA is “gifting” athletes a day off from sports that they likely would have had off anyway. So, it’s really just a six-day relief.

In Missouri , the “week” lasts nine days. The real treat is in the timing. Missouri dead weeks must start on Saturday and end on the following Sunday, giving athletes (and their families) two weekends off. Long summer vacations are possible again. (Another Missouri perk: Each school can choose its own dead week.)

The cynics might wonder why we as parents allow our kids to fall into this trap set by high school coaches: believing that summer activities are required. It’s a valid point that we should insist on family time and vacations, not just during the summer but year-round.

However, it’s a tough calculus. If your young athlete has worked for months to make a higher-level team, can you really trade a week in Branson for the hours of grind from your son or daughter? That is the implicit trade-off that dead weeks acknowledge — and give us brief relief from.

While the wording surrounding the KSHSAA bylaw is brief, the explanations in other states ( especially Missouri ) can stretch on for hundreds of words, including FAQs. You can imagine high school coaches searching for loopholes and these athletic associations trying their best to hold the line. In this handbook banter, you can sense the high school coaches biting their nails and wondering, “How can we take a week off of sports during the summer and still be good at our sport during the season?”

However, let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge the work that coaches are willing to do. Many bake on the artificial turf all summer to take their teams through drills. As a former high school coach, I know the pitiful payment most coaches receive each season. That paycheck fails to even approach minimum wage when divided across hundreds of extra hours during the summer and off-season. Their dedication to creating a winning team is inspired.

These dead weeks are so valuable, though. They give athletes a psychological break from repetitive sports. They give young bodies a rest from specialized movements that threaten to wear down knees, shoulders and elbows during the slog of the season. And they grant families a week away for vacation.

Maybe KSHSAA could extend its week to a true week or more. Maybe local school districts could require a bit more relief.

Or maybe families will need to pause sports and know that the family road trip trumps their athletes’ ambitions to make varsity.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Ka nsas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here .

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