The mission of Kansas Athletes, together with its partners, is to provide high quality photographs and news coverage of Kansas athletes and athletic events through our nonprofit partners for our athletes, their famlies, and the public good. Our name Kansas Athletes reflects our focus on the dignity of athletes as people to be supported and represented, rather than the sadly more common media view of athletics as an entertainment industry to be exploited for profit. Kansas Athletes will never be a partisan supporter of only one side at a competition, or of only one institution at an event. All athletes competing in Kansas, including athletes from elsewhere, as well as athletes from Kansas competing elsewhere, are all equally included. The job of each of our media people and photographers is to work for every person in each event they cover and to capture them with dignity, fairness, and quality.
Kansas Athletes provides its absolutely free news agency services exclusively to those truly nonprofit organizations and entities who do not receive any revenue at all and serve only the public good. We operate in the greater community of media resources by providing links, news content, and photography to a comprehensive network of fellow Kansas press providers—from large publications like VYPE to hometown newspapers like the Norton Telegram, all the way to national publications like Rand McNally road atlases and nonprofit charitable photography for Walmart. Our talented photography staff also contribute to a variety of out-of-state and national publications, from Florida to California, published from the Wichita Eagle to the Chicago Tribune.
Most importantly, every year for many years Kansas Athletes provides over 3,000 completely free licenses to its content at absolutely no charge completely for the public good, within the Kansas borders.
KS Athletes intentionally operates just as a good non-profit press service should—primarily in the background, meeting needs without being noticed. Annually, however, we also share directly our most important and, as always, completely free contribution to the public good, our annual complete analysis of the world's largest track and field meet. We cooperate with other national and international nonprofit organizations such as the IITCF and Historic Images to provide popular photo highlights and/or photo galleries with human-interest value to the Kansas community. Our work is provided safely to athletes, without any personal or public promotion permitted. Advertising which is the bane of the modern media world, is absolutely prohibited in conjunction with our media services.
The content-delivery network of KS Athletes, gameday.solutions, is powered by a 40 Gbps backbone of multiple modern servers with multi-level redundancy for pure game-day reliability.
All our work is achieved by volunteers who care about each and every one of our athletes in Kansas. They have spent tens of thousands of hours, and over a million dollars out of their own pockets in supporting our athletes. If you would like to be a part of this, you will need to go through a background check to ensure you are safe around children.
Please reach out to media @ ksathletics.com for information, or our director, Dr. Joseph Myers, at joseph.myers a t wichita.edu.
Please be understanding if we do not receive your emails. Currently, after two decades of being online, our primary emails have become inundated with spam, and the good messages rarely make it through. This is why we are careful not to provide our raw email addresses on this page. Instead, we include a space before and after the @ sign, or say "a t" instead of @, to try to prevent spam bots from grabbing our contact emails so easily.
Do not share ANY links to our free news content publicly in order to protect the safety of our athletes. If you share a link publicly, then creepy people immediately begin to download the incredibly high quality master photos and steal them and use them for nefarious purposes.
We will have to take down any gallery of photos or videos which has a link that has escaped into public availability. Likewise, all of our photos and videos are blocked from search engines. We do this because we care about our athletes.
This is the biggest track meet in the United States, maybe the world.
Enjoy a randomized photo collage from the new facilities of state track and field at WSU, courtesy of one of our volunteers.
Larry Staton is not one of our volunteers, but even better.
He has sacrificially dedicated almost all of his resources, time, and virtually his entire season of retired life to serving the Wichita State University track and field athletes as their top media person and top photographer for many years, giving of his own life for every single priceless person, and for God's glory.
Larry is a former WSU track and field athlete himself, holding incredible PRs that he is too humble to allow us to print, but they are at a quality level almost unheard of, even in Division I, something that a top WSU athlete might achive again once every two decades.
Maria Portela's all-time high school Kansas record-setting 100 meter dash time of 11.48 in the 2026 6A state track and field championship finals is a record that is beyond phenomenal, beyond amazing, the culmination of a series of miraculous records achieved by some of the world's greatest Kansas high school athletes of all time.
Maria's story is the culmination of a series of infinitely inspiring athletic miracles in the making directly from the power of God, that all began two years before, when Maria was just a freshmen in high school. That was the year, 2024, when another girl--a lot like Maria--the legendary Hanna Pellant, known as Manhattan's Queen of the Cinder, sprinted like a saint and set the 6A state meet record of 11.59 in what millions thought might forever be the ultimate 100-meter standard of all high school girls in Kansas.
Often the extreme fastest times of the state for high school girls still developing towards their ultimate life's fastest speed potential are measured as 12.00 at the fastest, like when the legendary, Megan "Catch Me" Campbell from Wellington, ran exactly 12.00 twice in the same morning, twice beating all other athletes in the state back to back in the prelims and finals in 2013.
People thought, with good reason, that it was all over for this record for at least 50 more years. Hanna was simply superb beyond superb.
But God had something special again in mind, a double miracle a million times more rare and amazing than a double rainbow.
And like lighting striking twice in the same spot, or like the unique design of each of an infinity of snowflakes, or like the resplendent rings of Saturn, or like any other proof to everyone except fools that God exists, the miracle was made from someone so, so, so special, and not just someone at the exact same school as Hanna, but someone in the exact same grade as Hanna, too.
Hanna Pellant's leadership, inspiration, support, and friendship helped her own teammate, the utterly legendary Harli Omli, to break Hanna's ultimate record by just the tiniest amount of a hundredth of a second, the very next year, setting a new all-time incredible, unbelievable, phenomenal state record of 11.58 seconds.
But God was not done with His miracles yet.
Maria herself was there in Harli's record-smashing 11.58-second race only a heartbeat behind at 11.72, just a flicker of flutter of a hummingbird's wing behind the legendary Delia Gregory at 11.71, who was laying it all out on the track and giving Harli the competition she needed to achieve the impossible a heartbeat ahead of her at 11.58 seconds to win it all.
And God's best miracle of all was saved for Maria just one year later, in the year of 2026, the year of Maria, and the third chapter of Maria's story that was written as a part of the two miracles the two years before.
Maria equaled and broke the generational-level records of Hanna and Harli, not just once, but twice in the same day on a day that will go in history as very special, Saturday, May 30, 2026. And these photos are memories of her, sprinting across the finish line in the finals, etching her name and her speed forever in history, 11.48, which rhymes with great, because she is.
In the calendar year 2025, our websites were viewed 61.7M times with over 7.3M unique visitors. Unfortunately, probably over three million of those were spambots, illustrating the importance of protecting our children from having our content with their names and likenesses available to the public. All of our galleries and media content require registration with an athlete's or parent's name, and acceptance of the terms and conditions mentioned in our Legal Information below.
Kansas Athletes is a press outreach of the nonprofit IITCF Library, a registered Kansas nonprofit organiztion, which, with full permission of the original artists, authors, and owners, fosters the creation, sharing, and support for information, science, technology, math, literature, nonprofit news images, and courtesy educational materials over 50 million times annually for editorial, factual, educational, newsworthy, informational, public interest, historical, and artistic purposes.
Our services are provided with complimentary and equal opportunity as directed by the IITCF Bylaws issued by its Board of Trustees for the public good to honor and glorify God.
If you are an athlete or parent of an athlete at an event we have covered, then, upon verification of your identity, you will be given a personal Copyright Release that reads as follows:
By virtue of the authority of the IITCF Board of Trustees, with legal authorization received from the original artist and copyright owner, for equally benefitting the public good as well as for God's glory in service of every person created in the image of God, permission is conferred to you, as named above, strictly in your individual role as a private member of the public, for your personal use only of any digital images and/or media of only you or your descendants, as displayed at the URL indicated above [the private media URL], at no charge, subject to the following limitations:
