There are many misconceptions about the way different sports are treated in high school. People frequently believe that football is favored over other sports and when Rogue News heard that the Girls Tennis Team no longer had access to a bus for their away games, an immediate investigation ensued.

“It is very important to treat all the sports equally, but sometimes when you have a smaller team that is going overnight, there’s ways we can get them there cheaper than other ways than we could for a large team that is just going for the day,” said Kemper about transportation of teams.

Further inquiry discovered that The rumors are not true. The school did not take away the Girls Tennis transportation and it is not just because they are girls. Rogue News interviewed Karl Kemper to get more information.

The Girls Tennis team has had seven road trips for league and local tournaments and for those there have been school busses. They will not have busses for their overnight tournament trip to Bend, nor for districts in Eugene.

When Ashland High School knows that a team will be needing a bus, they immediately talk to the Ashland School District transportation department, but there are requirements that have to be met. The team has to be a certain size to fit on a school bus, and if the trip is longer than eight hours, the ASD requires two bus drivers to go on the trip. At times, the ASD cannot provide said accommodations, so AHS looks to private charter companies for available transportation. This happens frequently to the football team because of the size of their team and the length of the trips they go on later in season. This also happens to the Girls and Boys soccer team because usually both teams are in the playoffs and they have games in the same places. So, the two teams share a bus and end up being a similar size to the football team, so they get a charter bus.

The Girls and Boys Tennis teams are small, they have no more than twenty players traveling to these tournaments per team and the Girls Tennis Team has a new coach, Keithan Gregg (who was also the boys basketball coach this year). A charter bus is too expensive for the small size of the team, so in the past the coaches for the tennis teams have gotten their commercial driver’s licenses and have driven the minibus themselves to the tournaments. The plan is the same this year for the boys team, Coach Streng will drive the boys to Bend and Eugene, but AHS ran into an issue when they realized that Coach Gregg has a Montana Driver’s License meaning that he cannot get his commercial license for Oregon. AHS came up with a quick plan where they would need parent volunteers to drive the team to these tournaments. But don’t worry! They are paying for their gas and for their lodging. Another option is for a parent to acquire a commercial driver’s license .  (Tarquin Daley’s father did this to be able to drive the baseball team around).

Karl Kemper made it clear that there is no favoring of specific teams and that it all depends on the circumstances of the situation. Kemper also stated, “There is no athletic program that has made me more proud in the last two years than our girl’s tennis team, because of their success on the court, in the classroom and as citizens.”