Bill could force KSHSAA to allow local broadcasters to stream Kansas high school playoffs

Many of Justin Fluke's broadcast workers would have loved to cover the Holton High School football team's state championship run last fall, because many of them were classmates of the students.

Fluke, the owner and president of the five-station, Hiawatha-based KNZA Radio Network in northeast Kansas, said he regularly employs about 10 students to handle everything from camera work to graphics to even the play-by-play duties.

Throughout the 2022 football season, the student employees worked many of the area schools' regular season football games.

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But when it came to cover Holton's journey to the 3A sub-state and state championship football games, they were barred from continuing their work, thanks to an exclusive agreement with NFHS Network, the streaming partner of the National Federation of State High School Associations.

NFHS is like the high school equivalent of the NCAA in that it establishes common sets of sports rules and provides other guidance to individual state members, including the Kansas State High School Activities Association.

"For the biggest, most exciting game of the year for their school, (we had to tell the students) that what they had been doing all year, it would not be possible for them to do," Fluke said.

A bill, passed already by the Kansas Senate and currently in the House Education Committee, could open post-season coverage to more broadcasters.

NFHS Network broadcasts Kansas high school playoffs, but also some regular season

Although Kansas high schools retain the rights to all of their regular season home broadcasts, rights to all post-season and state championship contests are retained by KSHSAA. The state governing body in 2019 signed a five-year, $45,000 contract with NFHS Network to produce and provide online video streaming of those post-season games and matches. Rights for terrestrial radio and television are handled separately.

The network can choose against covering any of those post-season matchups, in which KSHSAA may assign the rights to another broadcaster. But given the high level of interest in championship-level games, NFHS Network usually opts to broadcast them, and they provide play-by-play announcers for most, if not all, of those games.

Broadcast quality can differ, since the organization relies heavily on automated cameras that use motion-tracking technology to follow the action in games, panning up and down courts and fields as necessary.

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To watch games broadcast by NFHS Network, users must subscribe to the streaming service, either at an $11.99 monthly rate or $79.99 annual rate. Users then have access to games not just in Kansas but in most of the rest of the country, and the service is available through online web streaming or by apps on most major platforms.

Nearly 200 Kansas schools also work with NFHS Network to stream their regular season games, although those contracts are handled on a school-by-school basis. The network also provides schools with free motion-tracking cameras and installation with longer-term contracts. Since 2019, NFHS Network has returned $290,000 to those member schools.

Parents, broadcasters frustrated with non-local NFHS Network's technical issues

SB 13, however, would prohibit KSHSAA from entering into a new contract or renewing its existing one with any provisions that would maintain exclusivity for NFHS Network, subject to certain qualifications. Interested local broadcasters would have to have covered at least one-third of a school's regular season games, and they would also have to receive approval from local school host sites and provide competent and professional announcers.

Kansas would be the third state in the country to create such a law, preceded by Oklahoma and Alabama, said Alison Mazzei, president of the Kansas Association of Broadcasters. Although the organization did not introduce the bill, Mazzei said it was backing SB 13 after attempts to handle the matter with KSHSAA through less formal means failed.

Rep. Ken Rahjes, a Republican from Agra and a radio program director in western Kansas, said he and other high school community members have been frustrated with NFHS Network over these last few years. He said the service has been unreliable, with the streaming service often going down for parents trying to watch their children compete.

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"We don’t seem to have that problem when the locals are doing it," Rahjes said.

While he usually tends to prefer free enterprise, Rahjes said this is one situation where it might make sense to at least remove NFHS Network's exclusivity and allow local broadcasters, who become deeply familiar with student athletes over years of competition, to also broadcast state championships.

While local broadcasters are also looking at the bill from a financial angle, many proponents for SB 13 pointed out that local broadcasters tend to re-invest sponsor dollars into their communities, including into school clubs and yearbooks.

Students themselves could also benefit from getting to assist with behind-the-scenes broadcasting or even announcing, Rahjes said.

"They might get that passion to be a broadcaster or a webcaster," he said. "We might hamper the possibility of the next Mitch Holthus, Ryan Haney, or even Ken Rahjes."

KSHSAA argues that post-season streaming exclusivity ensures equitable coverage

KSHSAA, on the other hand, opposed the bill and asked the committee for time, at least while it tries to work with broadcasters to determine other potential solutions to the issues they identified in the hearing, said Bill Faflick, executive director for the high school governing body.

He said that KSHSAA contracted with the national network because it provided equitable coverage to all post-season sports and contests, regardless of a school's size, a sport's prominence or an athlete's gender.

"When you think about what this network does, it provides those same opportunities for our gymnasts, for our cross country kids, for our swimmers that occurs at some basketball games and some football games," Faflick said. "We had our first ever championships ever conducted with what I consider Olympic-caliber quality in swimming and diving, with names across lanes. Those kids deserve to be featured just as our basketball games and just as our football kids."

David Rudolph, CEO of the NFHS Network, testified that he could understand several of the concerns brought up during the hearing, but that the bill was the wrong remedy, and it would create more problems than it would resolve. In terms of logistics, it could become a nightmare for local host schools to handle dozens of broadcasters interested in covering a championship if exclusivity were prohibited, Rudolph said.

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The bill will likely be worked in the coming weeks, said committee chairman Adam Thomas, a Republican representative from Olathe, although he imagined it would not flow through as easily as it had when it was debated in the Senate.

"When you read a bill that passed the Senate 39-0, it just seems like a breeze, right?" Thomas asked. "It comes over here and you think it will be no problem. But then you have a hearing and testimony, and you oftentimes start thinking, 'OK, let's dive a little deeper into this.'"

The Capital-Journal's Jason Tidd contributed.

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at ‪785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.