Renaming urls and impact on SEO rankings

I have a client website where the page urls currently all end in .html. For example, www.example.com/sports.html. I wanted to change the urls to more accurately reflect what is on the webpage. For example, www.example.com/sports-fields-baseball. The navigation page names will not be changed; just the urls. My concern is that by changing the urls it will impact the SEO rankings that they currently enjoy for all the pages that end in .html. Should I be concerned?

Yes renaming pages will affect your Seo unless you properly set up per many redirects. These redirects will inform search engines of the new URL location. Typically, almost all (85% or more) Seo juice will flow to the new URL.

I hope that helps

Greg

It does help Greg. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Bruce

Sorry that should read Permanent Redirects. Autocorrect fail.