We sat down with Dan Newman, who helped write the policy and now runs it day to day at Union Public Schools in Tulsa, and Dr. David Martin of Perry Weather to walk through what OSSAA actually requires and why “plan ahead” came up more than almost anything else on the call. Here is what they covered.
The History of Heat Illness in High School Athletics
Between 1980 and 2009, there were 159 heat stroke fatalities among youth, high school, and collegiate players. Researchers studying a sub-sample of 61 of those deaths found that 100 percent occurred during conditioning drills, 97 percent of the victims were linemen, and 37 percent were being conditioned as punishment.
On the map plotting every fatality against WBGT at the time and place it happened, most cluster where conditions were above 32°C, but not all of them. One of the smaller dots on that map, marking a WBGT below 27.9°C, sits in Oklahoma, a reminder that a comfortable-looking number doesn’t rule out risk entirely.
The Georgia Study That Started It All
The research that turned this data into working policy came out of Georgia. Andrew Grundstein and colleagues proposed breaking WBGT into risk categories, and at each threshold, requiring specific changes: more hydration breaks, less equipment, shorter practices. Once Georgia schools implemented that system, heat-related illness fell between 30 and 100 percent depending on the category, with a full 100 percent reduction in the highest-risk range.
That result is a big part of why WBGT-based policy has spread state by state since, Oklahoma’s 2026 policy included.
What is Wet Bulb Globe Temperature?
A phone’s weather app shows ambient temperature, air temperature alone, and doesn’t account for how a body handles exercise in that air. Heat index adds humidity, but the underlying formula was built around a man roughly five-foot-seven to five-foot-eleven, walking in the shade in long clothing. It leaves out solar radiation entirely and was never built with an exercising athlete in mind.
WBGT, developed by the military in the 1950s after roughly 600 heat-related illnesses over two years of boot camp training at Parris Island, combines four factors instead of one or two: air temperature, humidity, wind speed, and solar radiation. Once the military adopted a flag system built around that number, heat-related deaths and illness dropped sharply, and the same approach later moved into occupational health and athletics.
| Measurement | What it accounts for | Why it falls short for athletics |
|---|---|---|
|
Ambient temperature
|
Air temperature only. | Ignores humidity, sun, and wind. Two days at the same reading can carry very different risk. |
|
Heat index
|
Air temperature and humidity. | Built for a person walking in the shade in long clothing. Ignores solar load and wind, and athletes are not in the shade. |
|
Wet bulb globe temperature
Athletics standard
|
Air temperature, humidity, wind speed, and solar radiation. | It doesn’t. Measured on site, where the athletes actually are, which is why it’s the standard used by the military, OSHA guidance, and FHSAA. |
Dr. Martin was direct about how far WBGT and ambient temperature can diverge, drawing on research he ran with Army meteorologists in the New Mexico desert:
“It was a hundred and six degrees outside, and the WBGT was eighty-eight, eighty-nine. The two numbers are not comparable. The humidity was so low that it was allowing the body to discard heat through evaporation, which is your body’s primary way of cooling, so the WBGT ends up much lower. Don’t automatically assume that because your weather app says a hundred degrees, practice is getting canceled. It could be that humidity is low enough that the WBGT tells a very different story.”
– Dr. David Martin, Director of Science, Perry Weather
The OSSAA WBGT Zones
Oklahoma splits into two regions. Region 2 covers the Panhandle, roughly 10 percent of the state; Region 3 covers everything else, about 90 percent, unlike neighboring southeastern states that fall entirely into a single region.
Source: OSSA Extreme Heat Policy 2026.
Dan Newman described how his own program actually plans around this chart, rather than reacting to it:
“We like to operate in the orange or yellow. I think the big part is planning. You look at the week ahead, you can kind of tell historically where you practice normally, and plan for that so you’re not making modifications on the fly.”
– Dan Newman, Associate Athletic Director of Sports Medicine & Performance, Union Public Schools
The top tier is a hard stop, not a slowdown; once a reading crosses that line, there’s no modified version of outdoor activity that satisfies the policy.
Measurement Requirements
30 minutes before. Set up the on-site WBGT instrument and let it acclimate to the environment; a handheld device pulled straight from an air-conditioned building and read immediately will give a false number.
15 minutes before. Take the first reading, either from the instrument or a qualifying internet-based app.
Every 30 minutes during. Re-read throughout the entire practice. Activity must adjust at each WBGT level change, and readings should be recorded and kept on file.
Whatever device gets chosen has to be the device used every day, not swapped out to fit the day’s plans. Dan Newman was blunt about why:
“If something happens and you have to go to court and defend yourself, you can’t switch your measurements to fit your needs. Pick one way. That’s why I’m pushing for a weather station, because everyone can see it, the alerts go out automatically, and there’s no if, ands, or buts.”
– Dan Newman, Associate Athletic Director of Sports Medicine & Performance, Union Public Schools
One nuance worth flagging directly: OSSAA’s board-adopted heat acclimatization program was voted on specifically for football. The broader activity guideline chart above applies to outdoor activity generally, but marching band is not formally bound by the same board-adopted policy the way football is. OSSAA has overseen band as part of its jurisdiction since 1962, and Dan Newman said OSSAA has challenged band directors statewide to adopt equivalent monitoring voluntarily, particularly since band programs, carrying tubas and props across blacktop in heavy uniforms for hours at a time, often face more total heat exposure than an athletic team does.
Emergency Action Plans, Cooling, and Hydration
Rapid cooling zones are required. Every EAP must include onsite rapid cooling using cold water immersion or an equivalent method, and it must be available at any outdoor athletic or marching band contest, practice, workout, or conditioning session held at 82.0°F WBGT or higher. Immersion tubs or ice-and-water tarps, the TACO method, both qualify.
Dan Newman described what “ready” looks like day to day at Union, where the athletic training staff has the benefit of two cooling setups:
“We have one outside on the field, and a cold plunge in the athletic training room right off our field. We’re kind of lucky, so we have two. On the best days, guys are just using it after practice, but we have it ready: we fill it up, we don’t dump ice in it. When we do need it, we start dumping ice and getting that body cooled.”
– Dan Newman, Associate Athletic Director of Sports Medicine & Performance, Union Public Schools
Size changes the plan. A 90-pound athlete and a 380-pound lineman don’t fit the same solution, and a tub that’s fifty yards from the field isn’t a real option either. Programs without a stationary tub near the action often turn to the TACO method, wrapping an athlete in a tarp and pouring ice over them, or a commercial full-body cooling bag, but whatever the method, it needs to be within reach of wherever practice actually happens, not on the other side of campus.
Hydration and rest are required, not optional extras. Athletes need unrestricted access to water at all times, and a rest break means real rest, helmets off for football players, with no activity involved, not just a pause between drills.
A written EAP should name the fastest way in, not just an address. Dan Newman ties this back to the most basic details: which gate is unlocked, whether construction has blocked an access point, who has the keys. His own athletic facility runs six separate EAPs for the same building because different activities and different parts of campus call for different, faster access points; heat emergencies get the same treatment as any other. Coordinating directly with local EMS and fire ahead of time, including a literal walkthrough of campus so responders already know where the elevators are and which gate to use, turns a plan on paper into one that works under pressure. The Korey Stringer Institute’s website has a blank EAP template available for programs that need a starting point.
Heat, Fatigue, and Performance: Why Rest Matters as Much as Water
Cramping gets blamed on hydration alone more often than it should. Dan Newman connected it to something coaches see every August: three or four straight days of full-intensity afternoon practice without full recovery in between.
“Cramping isn’t just hydration, it’s neuromuscular fatigue too. We’re taxing these bodies for three to four days, and coaches get frustrated because kids didn’t drink all day, but the kids haven’t recovered from Monday, let alone Friday, drinking all their water. We extended another week of practice this year to acclimate better, and I think we’re going to have fewer cramping issues in our first game because we’re not practicing at three o’clock in the afternoon for three days straight leading into it.”
– Dan Newman, Associate Athletic Director of Sports Medicine & Performance, Union Public Schools
A football player can sweat out as much as six liters an hour in full pads, but the stomach can only absorb one to one-and-a-half liters an hour, which means athletes routinely leave practice already dehydrated with no realistic way to fully rehydrate before the next session.
For every 1 percent an athlete is dehydrated, core temperature rises 0.15 to 0.2 degrees Celsius; at 2 percent dehydration in hot conditions, aerobic fitness drops roughly 10 percent. That deficit compounds across a week rather than resetting overnight, especially for student-athletes dealing with food insecurity or inconsistent access to meals at home, which makes the “if we can’t practice in it, we can’t play in it” argument weaker than it sounds: a team already running a fatigue and hydration deficit from three days of afternoon heat isn’t actually better prepared for Friday night by adding a fourth.
Do the Rules Change for Games?
The data answers that directly. Every recorded exertional heat stroke death traces back to conditioning practice, not competition, and games are structured in a way that already builds in recovery: fewer players on the field at once, five to ten seconds between plays, timeouts, and quarter breaks that practice simply doesn’t have. OSSAA’s competition rules formalize modifications many programs, including Dan Newman’s, were already coordinating informally with officials before the policy existed.
Source: OSSAA Extreme Heat Policy. Any athletic or band contest played at 82.0°F WBGT or higher must always have a rapid cooling zone on site, regardless of sport.
Softball is the clearest example of why the exemption exists. It isn’t equipment-intensive, and there’s already a lot of standing around between pitches, but without competition-specific modifications, Dan Newman pointed out the season would functionally push into October in Oklahoma’s climate. Instead, catchers and umpires, the two positions carrying the most gear, get a built-in hydration window starting in the second inning.
How Perry Weather Helps Oklahoma Schools Stay Compliant
Dan Newman still relies on a handheld Kestrel at Union, taken to the same spot every day and extrapolated across every facility on campus, and he’s candid that this isn’t the ideal setup: conditions on a turf field can run measurably hotter than a track field with more wind and shade, and a single point reading has to stand in for both. A Perry Weather station solves that gap by monitoring WBGT continuously and on-site, the same way lightning detection already works for most schools: visible to everyone, with alerts that go out automatically and no ambiguity about which number governs a decision.
OSSAA’s activity guidelines and competition modifications are configured directly into the platform, so a threshold crossing sends the specific required action, not just a number, to coaches, athletic trainers, and band directors alike. Every reading is logged automatically, building exactly the kind of consistent, defensible record Dan Newman described needing if a decision is ever questioned after the fact.
Perry Weather is currently offering discounted pricing for Oklahoma schools, valid for both new and existing customers, on hardware purchases and software upgrades.
If you want to see what automated WBGT monitoring looks like on your campus, get a quote today.
