Ready or not, the 2025-26 high school athletic year has arrived

NFL and D-I NCAA programs have been practicing for some time now, so it isn’t a huge shock to the system to note the Wisconsin high school football season kicked off Tuesday with the first practices statewide, about four weeks before classes will actually start in most school districts.

But, much like that July 4 holiday, if you’re a lover of summer, it’s another reminder the long days and warmth (and hopefully the smoke) are going to be making their 2025 exits sooner rather than later.

Insert looonnggg sigh here. At this sports editor’s desk, the summer transition is on schedule, at least more than some summers. Most of the old stuff is thrown away or deleted and replaced by new schedules and calendars. Just a few computer folders to purge, new spreadsheets to create and one conference composite schedule to pull together yet in the next week before it’s time to track down fall season previews, team pictures, etc. Football scrimmages are a week away and the first official high school competition, Medford’s girls tennis quad at Baldwin-Woodville, is next Saturday.

And then we spend almost 10 months waiting to see how it all unfolds.

The 2025-26 school year will bring some significant changes to some postseason tournaments. It adds a school to the Great Northern Conference. At first glance locally, there is a senior class in Rib Lake that would appear capable of continuing to lead another year of great success there. Some sports teams in Medford, particularly on the girls side, should feature some strong senior leadership, while you could see several other teams leaning on younger players to step up and fill many key roles. In Gilman, it’s another fall of high early hopes in football and a transition to some youthful potential in the girls sports.

In the GNC, the first change you will notice is the addition of the Merrill Blue Jays in all sports. Merrill has been in the league in football for several years and, if you recall, was a charter member of the GNC in its first two years, 2008-09 and 2009-10, for all sports before being thrown back into the Wisconsin Valley Conference in favor of Rhinelander.

Merrill was tough to beat in a lot of sports back in those first two GNC years. It’s fair to say things have changed for many of its athletic programs in the last 15 years and life has gotten more challenging. We’ll see if competing in the GNC over the Valley gives the Blue Jays a boost over the next several years.

This fall marks the debut of the WIAA’s new football qualifying procedures. The so-called “matrix” was approved in early February and will use a point system to blend a team’s wins and strength of schedule into the determining factors in qualifying for the 32-team brackets in each division, rather than the past practice of conference wins being the key criteria. The point system also will be directly used in seeding. To make the matrix work, team’s divisional placements are already determined as opposed to being finalized at the end of the season. Medford is solidly in Division 3 and likely won’t be moving any time soon.

Will the new system alter some teams’ chances of qualifying? Probably. Will it be a huge impact? Probably not. Like Medford head coach Ted Wilson told me in December when the matrix plan was a hot topic, win games consistently and the rest takes care of itself.

Changes to the 8-player tournament will affect Gilman and Rib Lake. That bracket expands to 32 teams this year, creating another level of the playoffs. If you thought the football season flew by already, wait until you’re talking about 8man playoff games already on Oct. 17. Both local squads felt like playoff teams last year, but both got left out of the 16-team field because their overall records weren’t quite good enough. I don’t foresee both being left out again.

Looking at other fall tournament stuff, the Prentice-Rib Lake Hawks’ quest for a Division 3 boys cross country state championship will start at a familiar course at the Phillips sectional on Saturday, Oct. 25. The 2024 state runnerups lost a couple key runners, but bring back a lot of depth. It will be fun to see if they make another run at the title in Wisconsin Rapids on Nov. 1. Merrill hosts the Division 2 sectional on Friday, Oct. 24.

Medford’s half of the Division 2 volleyball sectional is different than last year. Rather than going northwest like last year, the defending GNC co-champs could see some teams from the southwest early in the tournament, such as Mauston, Reedsburg and Wisconsin Dells, but a lot of the usual area suspects remain in the half-bracket too.

Rib Lake falls back into Division 5 after a year in Division 4. The Redmen shouldn’t fear anyone in their half of the Frederic sectional, though Prentice is a likely challenger. Gilman’s half-bracket in the Royall sectional now includes perennial post-season threat Newman Catholic, along with teams like Wisconsin Rapids Assumption, Athens and Eau Claire Immanuel Lutheran.

Medford is listed as the Division 3 boys soccer sectional final host on Nov. 1. Rice Lake hosts the Division 2 girls swim sectional on Nov. 8.

Medford’s girls tennis team welcomes its move back down to Division 2 after two seasons of being stuck in Division 1. The Raiders will see many familiar foes in subsectional and sectional tournaments both hosted by Altoona in early October.

Looking further down the road into winter, the WIAA wrestling tournament changes will be fascinating to watch with one huge sectional tournament individually and a much bigger focus on team competition. Medford starts Division 2 competition in February at the St. Croix Falls individual sectional with hopes of advancing to the team sectional at Chetek. Cornell-Gilman-Lake Holcombe’s individual Division 3 sectional is at Chequamegon.

The girls wrestling tournament will now feature four regional tournaments feeding into a sectional rather than two. Medford is at the Edgar regional and D.C. Everest sectional. Cornell-Gilman-Lake Holcombe’s Eau Claire/Chippewa Falls/ Menomonie area regional grouping is set but not the site. Ladysmith hosts the sectional.

After a year in Division 1 due to the WIAA’s success factor, the Medford-Colby gymnastics team is back down to Division 2, but the sectional field is different than what the Raiders typically saw in their dominant run from 2019-24. The site is yet to be determined, but they’ll be going up against teams like the Bloomer Co-op, Menomonie, Rice Lake, River Falls and Marshfield when they get to sectional competition in late February.

The Medford boys hockey co-op remains in a GNC-based sectional, the girls hockey co-op stays in its same sectional as does the boys swim team, though the site moves from Ashwaubenon to Rice Lake.

Of course, the basketball brackets are always of interest. The WIAA continued to play the flip-flop game with Medford as to whether it goes east or west in Division 2. This year, it’s the girls who get shifted west in their sectional half-bracket to go up against the Big Rivers/Mississippi Valley gauntlet of teams. The boys’ half-bracket is the same as last year, other than Ashland dropping out to Division 3.

Two key item in the area to note. One, Mosinee has dropped to Division 3, so Medford’s teams won’t see the Indians in the post-season. The other is Marshfield has now dropped below the 1,200 enrollment figure and into Division 2. The Tigers are on the other side of the girls sectional, so Medford wouldn’t see them until the final. But, because Marshfield’s boys made it to the Division 1 state championship game last March, by rule they stay in Division 1 for this year, which is probably a good thing from Medford’s point of view.

In Division 5, if you were looking forward to a Rib Lake/Owen-Withee girls sectional rematch, forget about it. The Redmen were moved east to the sectional featuring a lot of Central Wisconsin Conference teams as well as some familiar foes like Athens, Assumption, Columbus Catholic, Edgar, Newman Catholic and Prentice.

The Gilman girls, now coached by Owen-Withee alum Bailey Rosemeyer, however, could see Owen-Withee again, its regional final opponent in 2025 and sectional opponent in 2024. The Pirates’ sectional half-bracket tweaks in a southerly direction this year, away from the Northern Lights Conference while adding teams like Loyal, Eleva-Strum, Spring Valley, Plum City-Elmwood, Augusta and Alma Center Lincoln.

Rib Lake and Gilman are in the same Division 5 boys sectional half-bracket. If Rib Lake is going to make another run to the sectional final, the Redmen may have to add strong teams like Loyal and Columbus Catholic to their list of obstacles. Of course, what should be a very good Prentice team also is in the way. Turtle Lake could be waiting again in the final.

Spring assignments for 2026 have not been released yet, but it shouldn’t be too long before they are out.

Ready or not, here we go.

Matt Frey is the Sports Editor at The Star News.