Alas, so few Cinderellas in Kansas high school sports playoffs

In search of Cinderella in Kansas high school sports, columnist Eric Thomas searched this fall’s online playoff results for the Kansas State High School Activities Association. (Illustration by Eric Thomas/Kansas Reflector)

I root for the underdog.

Maybe you’re like me, urging a touchdown from a winless team or hoping for a goal from a cash-strapped squad. Sure, FanDuel says they will lose by six touchdowns — and that’s exactly why I’m cheering for them. I’m a sucker for it all: “Hoosiers” and Leicester City and the Miracle on Ice.

To identify the underdogs, we create power rankings for baseball seasons that are months away, coaches’ polls in college football and even national rankings in high school soccer. On betting apps, we find underdogs through point spreads and win probabilities.

All of that energy highlights the folly of prediction — attempting to compare teams that will never be in the same state, let alone the same tournament. “Who would win a lacrosse match between these two undefeated high school teams: one from Virginia and one from Texas?”

Nevertheless, see me there on the couch, fixated on the national rankings, pulling for the underdog and begging for a fourth quarter interception so that a team designated No. 19 will beat No. 18. What an inspiring story.

High school sports fuel my upset fever. I have been on the sidelines for countless games, camera in hand as a photojournalist, when plucky rural schools have spooked state-ranked all-star squads. It’s electric.

In search of Cinderella in Kansas high school sports, I scoured this fall’s online playoff results for the Kansas State High School Activities Association. After charting more than 100 games and more than a dozen brackets, I’m still looking.

This fall has been a blockbuster season for the favorites in Kansas high school sports, so far. In the three fall sports where KSHSAA provides seedings — girls tennis, boys soccer and football — the top-ranked teams are dominating in 2025.

Let’s start with football, because … well, America demands it.

For football, KSHSAA organizes the state brackets into east and west. There are 16 teams in each bracket for Class 1A through 6A. With two rounds complete, that means there have been 96 games in those classes so far. (I didn’t tabulate eight-player and six-player formats, since they use different seeding systems.)

In the first round, the top eight football seeds had 81 victories and 15 losses, winning almost 85 percent of games. More than half of the wins by lower-seeded teams were by No. 9 seeds beating No. 8 seeds — not the dramatic upset I wanted.

In the second round of the football playoffs, seeds No. 1 through 8 won 44 games. The bottom eight seeds? They won just four times.

All 12 football No. 1 seeds from 1A to 6A have survived the first two rounds. For us underdog fans, we must search to find the scattered low seeds.

If you think you’ve found an underdog in the 4A football bracket — the No. 13 seed — you will need to look closer. This low seed, Bishop Miege High School, is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They have mauled their first two opponents, 57-7 in round one and 30-6 in round two.

How did they earn such a low seed? A team’s winning percentage is the basis for KSHSAA football seedings. For Bishop Miege, that stat is misleading, the result of a challenging schedule filled with match-ups against larger schools, both from Kansas and Missouri. Sure, they lost often, but against 6A Blue Valley North and Rockhurst High School, the fifth best team in Kansas City.

This is not a typical 3-5 football team.

Miege often plays the postseason spoiler, frequently in the state basketball playoffs. The school draws a low seed after a handful of regular-season losses, and then they tear through playoff opponents with better seeds. It’s particularly cruel when Miege is underrated and they pick off a No. 1 seed in an early round, never to be challenged again on their run to a state championship.

If football can’t provide an underdog story, then what about Kansas high school soccer?

Alas, the top eight seeds in KSHSAA soccer this year won even more often than the favorites in football, an almost 88% winning rate in the first two rounds.

Only two teams seeded in the bottom eight escaped the second round. Both of them — No. 9 St. Thomas Aquinas and No. 11 Kansas City’s Piper — mimicked the resume of Bishop Miege in football. They hug the state line with Missouri and played punishing regular seasons in the metro area — a record that sunk their seedings. In the playoffs, they started strong.

While not a low seed, No. 5 Shawnee Mission East made an even deeper run to the state final in Class 6A soccer with a similar formula.

It’s stunning that KSHSAA’s seeding would be so reliable in predicting winners, particularly soccer. Scoring is lower in soccer, with far fewer goals in the sport than touchdowns in football or baskets in basketball. That leads to less-predictable outcomes in most soccer leagues. But in the Kansas high school soccer playoffs, the favorites kept winning.

That leaves us with tennis, but I’m warning you. Shield your eyes, my fellow underdog softies.

In four classifications this year, KSHSAA awarded both a singles championship and a doubles championship. That’s eight total champions. The No. 1 seed won seven of the eight brackets.

The only “upset” was in 3A doubles, where the No. 2 seed Reygan Coonrod and Inarie Rippert of Ellsworth beat the No. 1 seed.

Even the tennis semifinals were parades for the top seeds. The No. 1, 2 and 3 seeds in all eight tournaments advanced to the semis. In fact, the lowest seed to advance to the semis was No. 5 seed — hardly an underdog in a bracket that contained 24 competitors.

This is a good time to admit this: When I started my KSHSAA research, I thought I would be writing about how inefficient the seeding systems were. How they fed all kinds of upsets because they relied strictly on winning percentage, as in football and soccer. I had my ire poised for the keyboard.

Instead, it’s kudos to you, KSHSAA. With only a few Kansas schools providing upsets, your seeding was nearly undefeated.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.