YATES CENTER — A homeschool sports group hopes to find a home base.
Liberty Homeschool Alliance offers competitive sports and extracurricular programs for homeschool students in Southeast Kansas. The program began in 2018 with soccer and volleyball, later adding basketball and track. It primarily serves junior high and high school students but is starting to develop programs for elementary students, with about 40 families participating since the program began. The program is based in Yates Center and families come from Iola, Chanute, Moran, Independence, Longton and Garnett. The team name is The Arrows.
“We cover a wide swath of Southeast Kansas,” said Mark Reinhart, chairman and athletic director. “We don’t operate as a school because we meet solely for the competitive, athletic side and not for academics.”
Liberty is one of dozens of homeschool alliances approved by the Kansas State High School Athletics Association, which allows private, unaccredited and homeschool students to compete against public schools. The alliances were formed to give homeschool students a chance to take part in competitive athletic programs and extracurricular activities such as debate and forensics.
Last year, Kansas lawmakers approved a new law that allows homeschool students to join public school sports and extracurricular programs. Reinhart said that hasn’t diminished the number of families who join Liberty’s teams.
The homeschool alliance competes against regional public schools, including Iola, Chanute, Fort Scott, Altoona Midway and Pittsburg. In most cases, they compete against junior varsity teams. The homeschool team is not allowed to compete against public schools for district or state championships, though.
As Liberty’s program has grown, Reinhart and other families have started to dream about having a home facility to host events and reduce travel.
“For me, when I started envisioning the draw of homeschool families, I saw Yates Center as a nice central hub. We hoped we’d be able to find something in Yates Center” for a home base.
In June, representatives from Liberty asked the Yates Center City Council to consider selling the DeLay Stadium, an older facility that is no longer used to host high school sporting events. The homeschool alliance proposed making renovations to the stadium for its athletic events. The group also wanted to build a gymnasium. The property already has soccer fields. A storm, though, destroyed light poles at the facility.
“It’s a beautiful facility for being antique,” Reinhart said. “For the most part, it’s in good condition but it needs a little TLC. You don’t run into very many stadiums built with rock.”
Some community members were concerned about the plan, according to reports from the Yates Center News. At the Council meeting in June, residents were split on the proposal and asked several questions. They wanted to know more about Liberty’s proposed renovations, the group’s financing and what might happen if the homeschool program dissolved. Yates Center High School still uses the stadium for practices. 
Since then, YCHS head football coach Ryan Panko offered alternative solutions on how the city can improve the stadium and perhaps utilize it for a limited number of high school football games.
At a city council meeting Sept. 16, Panko outlined cost estimates to replace lighting and repair the scoreboard, and suggested the field could be renovated to host games within about two years.
The fate of DeLay Stadium was not decided, but Reinhart said he believes Liberty’s request to purchase the stadium “has been put on the back burner.”
“We’ll always put things in God’s hands,” he said. “We are exploring other possibilities.”
