I'm Phil Lee with WRCO Sports.
There are a lot of youth football opportunities this year.
Chris Clarkin is again heading up the Richland Center area youth football opportunities.
So signups are open right now for first through fourth grade flag football and then we also
offer fifth and sixth grade tackle football. So everything that we have you can go to RC football.com.
Underneath of that you go into into the forms and then you'll be able to see the link
to get those signed up. We do everything online now. There's no paper copies that we're
going to do to sign up. So everything's through riser.com. If you go to our Facebook page,
you'll have event numbers for each one. That way you can find those.
Okay. And is it against other schools? Culture or do you just kind of do inner squads?
Yeah. So for the first through fourth grade flag football, we'll do a partial inner squad.
We'll do six weeks of play against each other. So each level will have four teams.
So they'll play each other twice for those six weeks. And then I like to host my own tournament
to bring in other schools in. And then one thing we did new last year was we actually did
someone else's tournament just to see kind of how somebody else runs it and how they do it.
So we'll stick with that. We'll do one tournament away, one tournament home.
And then we'll have about six weeks of play here. As far as the fifth and sixth grade
program, I'm actually the league director for the whole thing. And that's brand new. So they
just forwarded me in over the winter to be the head of that. So we have six teams within that.
So there is going to be travel. There's point at New Galaris, Edgewood,
St. Francis out of cross planes, who will be partnered up and done a lot of things with
over the summer. And then basketball, River Valley, us are all in that. So there will be some
travel, but it's extremely fun. This, it's basically eight man football on half a field
going one direction. So there's not all those crazy, you know, blindside hits, crazy,
you know, injuries that happen. Everything is, you know, with the intent to keep it as safe as
possible for the kids. And it's awesome. When do you play those games, Chris? So those games
are going to be on Saturdays. We've done a cool thing in the past, a couple of years where if,
you know, we've usually done it with basketball, with River Valley, to where we'll contact their
head coach, the director of the program and go, hey, let's do a night game. And we'll usually
schedule for Thursday night. We do it up on our game field, turn the lights on, scoreboard.
I get the high school kids that come down around the chains, do some refereeing. So it's, it's
always cool to get them underneath the lights to see potentially where I'm going to end up.
That is Richland Center assistant football coach Chris Clarkson. Youth opportunities are
happening right now in the Richland Center area, not just for the Richland School District
youth as well. Church League softball coming up tonight on Crosca Park's regular season wrap up
games on the East Diamond seven o'clock nights of Columbus plays the mission and grace will umpire
at 815 Baptist Temple one takes on grace community with the mission umpiring on the West
Diamond at seven free Methodist plays the Nazarenes St. Mary's will umpire at 815 Baptist
Temple two plays St. Mary's free Methodist will umpire and basketball assembly of God will
have a buy the 2025 Church League tournament begins next Tuesday August 5th. As the calendar gets
set to turn to August there are changes coming up for the high school sports season beginning
right away in the fall high school football practices will begin August 5th with the rest of
WIA fall sports getting underway by mid August and early competition as early as August 14th
for the sports of girls golf. NIL was much discussed last year and will become a thing this year.
It was one of four constitutional amendments approved by school administrators around the state
at April's WIA annual meeting. High school NIL opportunities from Wisconsin are much different
than what is available to NCAA college athletes and also different than what is available in other
states. The new NIL rules note several ways in which deals must be executed in order to preserve
amateur eligibility. NIL appearances can involve any school conference or WIA mentions uniforms
or logos. That's one key difference from NCAA rules. Another difference is that high school
students can't endorse products that are age inappropriate such as tobacco, alcohol, gambling,
firearms or adult entertainment to name a few. High school students also can't have an agent
or other professional representation to make NIL deals and anyone associated with a school program
can't act as a facilitator for deals. That's a big departure from the NCAA rules that allow for
agent representation. One area where the WIA rule in the NCAA are in agreement, so-called pay
for play practices are illegal. That means student athletes can't enter into an NIL deal
that rewards athletic performance, influences student to transfer or remain in a particular school
or are otherwise contingent on player or team achievements.
