WKYT Investigates | Which high school sports see most player, coach disqualifications

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – New numbers from the Kentucky High School Athletic Association are shining a light on disqualifications. The group keeps track of DQs for all sports during all seasons.

The sport with the most disqualifications is soccer.

“Soccer, it is a contact sport, there is some rough play in it, but also the playing rules. If I get two yellow cards, it may not have anything to do with unsporting acts, I’m ejected,” explains Butch Cope, an associate commissioner for the KHSAA. Cope supervises their sportsmanship bylaws. Soccer players made up more than one out of every three athletes disqualified last school year. “You can’t judge it by that because the playing rules are a little bit different.”

The reasons for disqualifications vary. They can include fighting or punching, spitting, unsportsmanlike conduct, and rule violations, which are most common in soccer. Overall, soccer racked up the most disqualifications last year—226 players and 18 coaches—followed by basketball, football, and baseball.

More than a third of baseball’s DQs were coaches being tossed from a game.

“Sometimes they say, well, I gotta get my team fired up. You hear a coach say well, I’ve got to take one for the team and get them fired up. I don’t really buy into that as a motivating factor on that, but for some reason in that sport, that seems to be the norm,” says Cope.

The KHSAA also breaks down numbers by school. In Western Kentucky, Butler County had the most, with 27, followed by Seneca in Louisville, Breathitt County, and then Anderson County.

Cope says a large amount of disqualifications at one school usually means there was a bench-clearing incident. In those cases, each player that leaves the bench is disqualified.

“We’ve seen the last couple years more bench-clearing instances, whether that’s on the basketball court, or the football sideline, on the baseball diamond,” notes Cope.

WKYT obtained disqualification numbers for the last six years, but they’re hard to compare. There were no sports in the spring of 2020, and seasons were greatly reduced in the following fall and in the spring of 2021. Cope told us numbers are now back up to pre-pandemic levels.

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