This year, UPrep introduced Puma League, leading to a change to the middle school athletics program. Instead of having five volleyball, girls basketball and boys basketball teams, there are only two teams for each.
The rest of the players go into Puma League, a program where there are no games against other teams, but instead, they practice on Wednesday and have an in-school scrimmage on Saturday.
There is also a Puma League offered for Ultimate Frisbee this winter.
Assistant Director of Athletics Jonathan Kim made this decision due to an increase in sports participation and a lack of space for more than two teams at once in the Pumadome.
“I’ve been thinking about making this intramural league for two years now,” Kim said. “I decided to do it this year because with our growing enrollment, I knew that there was going to be some constraints on facility usages based off of our participation rates.”
Seventh grader Helen Heliso, a participant in the volleyball girls Puma League, wants the experience of the games to help her improve as well as the instruction.
“I feel like if it was just …D1, D2, D3, D4, , and D5, it would make other people happy because they get to play against real schools,” Heliso said. “But infinitely, we just play against…ourselves,”
Seventh grader, Ahana Kameshwar, another participant in the volleyball Puma League agrees with Heliso.
“People in the league team improve, but I also feel like the people in the Puma League also need experience like playing in tournaments,” Kameshwar said, “They also need that experience of going around playing other teams and games, and I feel like it’s lacking in that area.”
Although some people feel like the Puma League is lacking, sixth grader Ada Troutman, a basketball player in the Puma League who has never been on an organized team before disagrees.
“I didn’t want to go straight from nothing all the way to a team, because I wouldn’t know the rules and I wouldn’t know everything I needed to play,” Troutman said.
Sixth grader Addison Smith, who participated in both the volleyball and basketball Puma Leagues likes the instruction Puma League offers.
“I like getting a lot of help, and since the basketball girls [Puma League] is a lot smaller, it’s easier to get individual help if I was put on a regular team, the coaches [would] just expect me to be good and not have fun,” Smith said.
In a survey, the average amount of improvement students felt they made was around seven out of ten and the average amount of fun they had was around seven too.