What’s changed in Butler County high school sports since 2000? Health protocols, equity and more
If one stepped into a time machine and jumped back 25 years, high school sports wouldn’t look the same.
Football teams pounded the ground rather than aired it out. On the basketball court, plenty more shots would come from inside the arc than out of it. Scores of baseball pitchers weren’t throwing 90 mph, either.
There’s a lot more than meets the eye in terms of changes in high school athletics over the last quarter century. These have been some of the more impactful:
Butler athletic director Bill Mylan remembers getting his bell rung playing football and butting heads in wrestling, then sitting out for just a few minutes before re-joining activities. Butler football coach Eric Christy said concussions weren’t spoken of when he played for the Golden Tornado.
“You shook it off and went back in there,” Christy said. “Or you might’ve rested for a little bit or they told you to go sleep, which is the opposite of what they tell (you) now.”
Health and safety protocols have improved in high school sports since their playing days.
“We are now more aware, and we’re making our coaches more aware of you don’t just put a band-aid on it and say, ‘Go back in and play,’” said Seneca Valley AD Heather Lewis, who’s entering her 14th year in her post.
Pennsylvania requires every coach in the state to annually renew their concussion and cardiac arrest certificates. Coaches also have to take a coaching education course periodically. Butler also sports three on-campus athletic trainers.
“The health and safety focus kind of jumps out to me right away,” said Mylan, who became Butler’s athletic director in 2010. “The courses that my coaches have to take — the concussion protocol course, the cardiac arrest, the first aid and safety,” Mylan said. “We implemented the heat (acclimatization) practices for football. ... We’ve progressed so much in that area.”
Christy also said Guardian Caps and teaching better tackling techniques that lessen blows to the head and neck areas have helped make football safer. Before last season, Christy said Butler had previously ordered 100 Guardian Caps, cushioned shells that can be attached to the outside of a football helmet. Most other high school football teams in the county use them, too.
Increasingly rare, Lewis said, are the days where a child trades a football helmet for a basketball, then for a baseball glove.
“We’re taking that away from kids,” Lewis said.
A sport’s season is no longer limited to the high school scene. The growth of AAU basketball, 7-on-7 football and club volleyball, baseball, softball and soccer have altered the dynamics of high school athletics.
The National Federation of State High School Associations said in June the “decline of multi-sport athletes is one of the leading concerns related to non-school sports participation.”
“Now, a young person can play just their sport year-round,” Lewis said. “We’re losing multi-sport athletes. Young people are specializing so soon and so early. ... We’ve lost perspective of the purposeful benefits of sport. We’ve become singularly focused on, ‘How good?’”
As someone who has to care for each of the school’s athletics teams, Mylan agreed that the pigeonholing a child into one sport hurts. The three-sport athlete is now, as he put it, “a rare bird.”
“If you’re going to go on to the college level and compete, you have to do more than just in-season in order to be ultra-successful and be that Division I athlete — or even playing college sports today,” Mylan said. “I think that’s taking away from kids when they specialize in a sport.”
More attention is now being paid to women’s sports at the professional levels. That awareness is trickling down to lower levels, as well.
“Now the high school girls have something to go watch that they can identify with and aspire for,” Lewis said. “There’s a professional volleyball league, there’s a professional softball league, there’s a professional women’s lacrosse league. All of these young female athletes, when they see that, it goes to the cliche, ‘If you see it, you can be it.’
“Now they realize they can be that.”
Essentially every boys sport has their girls counterparts nowadays, even football, as girls flag football will become a PIAA sanctioned in 2026. Mylan predicts girls flag football and wrestling are going to pick up in popularity.
Over the past three years in Pennsylvania, the number of girls wrestlers has nearly doubled from 1,080 to 2,040, according to NFHS.
“It’s awesome to provide more opportunities for the female side of sports,” Mylan said. “Back in the ’70s and ’80s, they weren’t offered as these types of things. ... To give them an opportunity to showcase their skills and talents, we’re headed in the right direction, for sure.”
For girls and women, the interest has always been there. Everyone is just now getting with the program, Lewis said.
“Generationally, I think sports has always been popular for women,” Lewis said. “It’s probably, now, the ease of which people can see them. ... It’s just the rest of the world needs to understand women can be athletic and compete in sports and it’s a good product and we’ll take advantage of every opportunity that we’re given.”
Technology, data and analytics have become intertwined with athletic evaluation.
“It’s 2025,” Lewis said. “The resources available from a technology standpoint, they’re almost unlimited. Everybody’s creating a new app, a new tool, a new statistical marker.”
Butler and Seneca Valley, among plenty of other schools, use Hudl, a performance analysis platform that allows coaches and players to watch game tape and produce highlights for recruiting. It can give basketball teams their field goal percentage, for example.
“From underwater cameras in swimming to heart rate monitors on soccer players ... whatever it is, the evolution of technology has allowed for the evolution of analytics and the creation of more data,” Lewis said.
