Ridgeline High School’s senior athletes are grappling to get their hands on three required P.E. credits needed in order to graduate. 

Ridgeline does not allow their students to count their sport for more than one credit, even if they play for more than one year. This makes it hard for athletes who play one sport year-round to fulfill the requirements to graduate. 

Ryan Rockhill, a trainer at Ridgeline, said, “If you are taking P.E. while you’re doing your sport and weights, you are overdoing it as an athlete.” As a trainer of the sports teams, he sees what athletes do every day to train and knows the best ways to help them progress in their sports.

Shelby Blankenship is a senior softball player, and has played for the Ridgeline softball team since her freshman year. In order to meet the P.E. requirements for graduation, she took weights classes to count for her credits. While taking one of these weights classes, she was also participating in her sport full-time and going to other workouts required by the softball team. This is a glimpse of what Shelby’s day was like: she would spend one hour in her weights class, one hour doing workouts for softball, and three hours of practicing the actual sport. When asked about her experience with juggling all of that, she said, “It was very hard but fun.”