CASPER, Wyo. — High school athletics in Wyoming could see some drastic changes in the coming years following legislative changes to the state’s education budget, the Wyoming High School Activities Association recently announced in a statement.

According to the WHSAA, Wyoming school districts are facing a projected $3.9 million shortfall in activities funding, forcing officials to consider significant cuts to high school sports and extracurricular programs.

The WHSAA shared details regarding a new “silo” funding model implemented by the Legislature, stating that the recalibrated block grant model reduced funding for student activities and extra-duty responsibilities from $46.3 million to $42.4 million, an approximately 8.4% decrease statewide.

WHSAA Commissioner Trevor Wilson said the restructuring also restricts district access to an additional $76.2 million in previously flexible funding.

“A significant portion of the [April 28 WHSAA Board of Directors] meeting was dedicated to discussing the projected funding shortfall,” Wilson wrote.

The WHSAA is weighing several strategies to address rising costs with fewer resources. Proposed changes include eliminating regional tournaments and reducing the number of teams qualifying for state events from eight to four; limiting wrestling to two classes and restricting track and field state participants to the top 16 marks; making cuts to soccer, indoor track and field, Nordic and Alpine skiing, swimming and diving, spring golf and tennis; and reducing in-person speech and debate events by half and centrally locating All-State Music events to minimize travel. The board also recommended increasing gate admission or implementing student participation fees to offset costs.

While the WHSAA release states that no plans have been finalized and the various changes are currently just possibilities, Natrona County School District 1 Board of Trustees member Mary Schmidt criticized the WHSAA’s handling of the news at Monday’s board meeting.

“I take some issues with this, [including] the sheer fact that we as Board of Trustees members have not talked about that at all,” Schmidt said. “It is not our intent and it has not been brought to us to cut our athletics or activities budget for the upcoming school year. … I take issue with them picking sports and getting the community upset and ginning them up to be upset that this is all going to be cut when that hasn’t been discussed.”

Later in the meeting, Superintendent Angela Hensley clarified that Natrona County School District 1’s athletics and activities budget saw a reduction of roughly $550,000 in the coming year’s budget, but said the local school district does not plan to cut any sports.

“Thank you, Trustee Schmidt, for saying this, because I think people are wondering — we are not planning to cut athletics and activities for next year,” Hensley said. “We do have to take a look at our entire budget as we have talked about, as we learn more about these new rules that come in.”

Related

San Francisco is having a civic nervous breakdown because the brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law is buying a minority stake in the Giants.

Not Donald Trump. Not Jared Kushner. Joshua Kushner. And not control of the team. A minority stake.

Apparently, that is enough to send parts of San Francisco’s activist and media culture into full panic mode.

One Giants employee posted a video from Oracle Park turning in their uniform and quitting because Kushner was buying into the team.

Social media lit up with complaints about “MAGA ownership” and Trump-world influence invading one of San Francisco’s most beloved civic institutions.

There is just one problem. Joshua Kushner is not exactly Steve Bannon in a Giants cap.

He has historically donated heavily to Democrats and has occupied a very different political lane than his brother Jared and the Trump orbit. But nuance never stood a chance here.

For some in San Francisco, the name “Kushner” was enough. That is the story.

The Giants are not some random expansion franchise nobody cares about. They are one of the oldest and most storied franchises in Major League Baseball history — with eight World Series titles and a lineage that includes Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner, and Bruce Bochy.

Oracle Park is one of the great settings in American sports. Giants-Dodgers is still one of baseball’s defining rivalries. Generations of Northern Californians are emotionally attached to this team.

Which is precisely why the reaction has been so revealing.

Nobody was arguing about payroll. Nobody was debating the farm system. Nobody was asking whether this helps the Giants close the gap with the Dodgers in the NL West.

The panic was political from the first pitch.

That tells you where we are now.

Sports ownership used to be judged mostly by whether owners were competent, stable, and willing to spend money to win. Now it is an ideological background check.

Who donated to whom? Who attended what fundraiser? Whose brother married whose daughter? Who might show up in the owner’s suite?This is what happens when politics becomes religion. Everything becomes a loyalty test. Even baseball.

The irony is almost too perfect.

San Francisco is not exactly at risk of becoming a MAGA beachhead because a Democratic donor with the wrong last name bought a small piece of the Giants. But symbolic politics runs the city now.

In Democrat circles in San Francisco, politics is not just something people believe. It is something they perform. It is identity. It is status. It is social sorting.

So even indirect association becomes contamination. Joshua Kushner does not have to be Trump. He does not even have to be conservative. He just has to be Kushner.

That is enough.

To be fair, Giants ownership was already politically sensitive. Current owner Charles Johnson has drawn years of criticism for conservative political donations.

So this latest development landed on dry grass.

Still, the reaction says more about San Francisco’s liberal elite than it does about the Giants. The city’s activist class cannot even let baseball remain baseball.

A minority owner becomes a political emergency. A family connection becomes a scandal. A business transaction becomes a moral crisis.

This is not normal.

Fans used to argue about batting orders and pitching rotations. Now they investigate ownership family trees.

And the Giants are not being bought by Donald Trump. They are not being turned into a Trump campaign surrogate. They are not replacing team mascot Lou Seal with a MAGA hat.

A minority stake is changing hands. That’s it.

Yet for the loudest voices in San Francisco, even that apparently requires public anguish.

If this is the reaction to the brother of Trump’s son-in-law buying a minority piece of the Giants, imagine what happens if Donald Trump ever throws out the first pitch at Oracle Park.

Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics and a lifelong baseball fan, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.