Powell High School sports teams often miss school and spend lots of time on a bus in order to compete.

It’s normal to have classes on Fridays in which only 6-7 students are present instead of the usual number because everyone is away for a sport or activity. Though having the early-release Fridays ensures there are more students than was common in previous years with the regular schedule, many athletes still have to miss school.  The number of hours of missed school varies between sports.

According to PCSD1 Transportation Supervisor Stephen Janes, so far this fall season, football has the second-least amount of school missed with 10 hours and four additional hours if players participated in JV games as well. Varsity volleyball has missed about 25 hours of school and JV and freshman teams missed 20 and nine, respectively. Golf missed 35 hours and tennis missed 26 hours. Cross country has missed 16 hours and Lady Panther swimming has missed four hours of class.

The football, volleyball, swimming and cross country hours do not include the time missed for the still-upcoming regional and state events.

“Regionals and state usually are held on a Thursday, Friday and Saturday, so students miss about 11 hours of class time,” Janes said.

With the large distance between most towns in Wyoming, sports teams sometimes have to travel quite a ways to compete.

With all the fall sports combined, a total number of approximately 16,400 miles were driven in the 2017 season last school year.

“I don’t have it broken down by sport,” Janes said. “But you would be pretty close giving football 25 percent, volleyball 30 percent, tennis 20 percent, golf 15 percent and cross country 10 percent.”

Using these numbers, football traveled approximately 4,100 miles last season. Volleyball traveled 4,920 miles and tennis drove 3,280 miles.  Golf traveled 2,460 miles and cross country traveled the least with around 1,640 miles. These aren’t the exact numbers of miles traveled; they are just estimates.

Some of the teams have also traveled to the same place multiple times this season. The cross country team has gone to Lander twice this season and the tennis team went to Gillette twice for both regionals and state. By the end of the season the swim team will have traveled to Riverton, Cody, and Laramie twice and to Worland and Lander three times each.

“We did go to one town about [3] times, which wasn’t very fun,” senior Caitlyn Miner said.