photo by: Carter Gaskins/Special to the Journal-World

Lawrence High's Elijah Gray (76) and team line up for a play against Free State's defense Friday night, Oct. 13, 2023, for the City Showdown at Free State.

KSHSAA’s executive board announced in a press release on Thursday several approved changes to postseason competition in football, basketball, track and field and wrestling from the board’s meeting this week.

Football’s 2024 state championships will take place at three locations across the state. Classes 6A, 5A and 4A will take place at Emporia State University. The 6A state championship will be on Friday, November 29 at 2 p.m., while the other two classes will take place the following day, with the 4A game at 1 p.m. and the 5A game at 7 p.m.

Classes 3A, 2A and 1A will be at Hutchinson Community College, with the 2A championship at 6 p.m. Friday, November 29. The 3A championship will be on Saturday, November 30 at 12 p.m., with the 1A game later that day at 5 p.m. Kiowa County High School in Greensburg will host Class 8-player DI, DII and 6-player championships, all on Saturday, November 30.

The basketball state championships will be held at four locations starting in the 2025-26 season. The scheduling of each classification at which locations and venues will not be announced until after the 2024-25 season. For classes 3A and below, teams will be divided into four regions and seeded into two substates of each region, with the substate winners advancing to the state tournament.

Qualifiers for the state track and field meet will now be the top three event leaders through the course of the track season with the next four best regional performers per event, for a total of seven.

Girls wrestling will now include four classifications, which equals boys wrestling: 6A, 5A, 4A and 3-1A. September’s KSHSAA executive board meeting will produce state sites and regional dates for the 2025 wrestling season.

Another notable product of the meeting was the announcement of a committee to work with member schools on potentially sanctioning esports at the high school level. According to an NFHS article in March, 20 state organizations have some sort of state-sponsored esports competition.