Enterprise, The (Brockton, MA) - Tuesday, September 8, 2009
By Adam Riglian
ENTERPRISE STAFF WRITER
Preparation is paramount in football. It's a game of strategy, gameplanning, training and hard work. It's not all done in the stadium, film room or practice field either.
Running a high school football program is no easy task. It's budgets, promotion, community-building, planning and all manner of wheeling and dealing.
There's no surprise that money is one of the biggest issues to making it all work.
Per player, hockey may be the most expensive mainstream high school sport, but football is not far behind. Numbers-wise, football far outranks the majority of sports, with some area high school football programs drawing more than 100 athletes.
Covering those expenses creates a secondary role for most coaches.
"We're all spending too much time fundraising instead of coaching," Bridgewater-Raynham head football coach and athletic director Dan Buron said. "It's tough on the parents too, they are paying to play, they're paying for the fundraisers and I think we are all feeling that tension."
Despite budget cuts, most high schools are still given a fair amount of money for athletics, although it is divided over a greater number of sports than it would have been in the past, especially with the growing emergence of lacrosse.
User fees have become an answer for many schools, making students "pay to play," charging a set amount by sport, and usually with a cap on how much can be charged in a year per family.
These fees can be poison to some programs, often pricing some students out of athletics all together, but many high schools have been able to keep them reasonable.
At Whitman-Hanson High School, user fees range from $150 to $250 charged per year.
"That's a big challenge, because some people just can't (afford it)," Whitman-Hanson athletic director Jim Daley said.
Such fees are becoming standard practice at most schools across the state. At Bridgewater-Raynham, which has had such fees for years, the price per year is $250, down from $500.
Daley said that his school is trying to be innovative in how parents can pay for user fees, including having students or parents help out at games doing ticket collection.
These fees do get put to good use, especially in football, where the school provides most of the equipment, and must keep it up to code to ensure safety.
Jim von Euw, athletic director at Oliver Ames, said he has been fortunate in that he has not seen a rise in equipment costs for the football, making it out of line with other sports.
Daley agreed, adding that once a relationship is built with an equipment company, pricing becomes easier.
There are other costs that most don't even consider, such as busing players to road games, especially if teams are in leagues that require lots of travel.
Whitman-Hanson transferred into the Patriot League from the Atlantic Coast League in 2008 largely for this reason. Daley said that it took three buses at $500 per to get the football team to away games at Nauset, while it costs around $150 for games at Pembroke and Rockland.
"Busing is a problem," Daley said. "We're fortunate when we made the move into the Patriot League, our expenses for travel went way, way down."
Income from gate receipts does some to help offset costs. Gate receipts have been hurt by West Nile and Eastern equine encephalitis scares in some towns, which have put night games in jeopardy and created scheduling confusion among prospective fans.
"Last year, when we had (normalcy) back, we did very nicely," Daley said. "For all sports last year, our outdoor gate was very good."
When ticket sales and the athletic budget fails to cover the bases, football teams look to local support groups. Most area teams have such extracurricular aid like Save Our Sports in Brockton, Friends of B-R Athletics and Rockland Sports Boosters among others.
"Without them, we'd be in big trouble to be honest," Buron said. "I'm not sure we'd have a program. They've kept us alive the last five years."
Friends of B-R have helped cover Trojans' costs for items that used to be in the athletic budget, like awards, plaques and banquets.
They also make special contributions for big-ticket items that teams could not get any other way, like new sideline chairs for basketball, improved dugouts for baseball and headsets for football.
Save Our Sports has done wonders for Brockton High athletics, including keeping the school free of user fees.
"Save Our Sports has been instrumental in keeping all our teams competitive," Brockton coach Peter Colombo said. "Brockton user fees would be even tougher on our populace."
The fundraising group helped Brockton build its weight room facility and new practice fields after the Brockton Rox took over parts of campus.
It's not all about getting enough money to play football , though. It's also about getting enough football players to play.
Before athletes can even be coached there is another challenge, drawing enough students to put a team together. Some programs have no problem such as Brockton or B-R, which had 60 freshmen come out this season. Others have seen their numbers slip over the years.
East Bridgewater had 73 players come out for the team in the 2004 season, but just 48 in 2008. Middleboro's numbers sank by 18 players over that span and Rockland's by 22.
Southeastern Regional head coach and athletic director Dan Tripp says his school has drawn up a new plan to get students involved.
While their school day ends at 2 p.m., the administration has created an extra period that lasts until 4 p.m., when the first school buses to bring students home arrive. Participating in a sport satisfies the requirement for that period.
"There's no bus home at 2 o'clock, but there is at 4 and 6," Tripp said. "So they're saying "Stay around, do something, get involved in our school community.' I think that's really going to help the number of students involved in extracurriculars."
Southeastern has had very strong turnouts in football in recent years, even before the current extra period was passed, although it has yet to be determined how its new approach will effect turnouts.
Some smaller high schools have gone a different route, putting together cooperative teams to boost numbers.
Cooperative teams are an option for programs too small to field football or having trouble drawing enough players to be competitive.
There are 23 cooperative football teams across the state, including Holbrook and Avon locally. The pairings have even merged private schools with public schools in some instances, notably Bishop Connolly and Westport High School and Holyoke Catholic and Granby High School.
Some schools have the opposite problem, reigning in the number of kids who want to participate. Brockton has to make cuts for its football teams, something most coaches never have to think about.
"Boiling it down to a number we can coach (is difficult)," Colombo said. "We have to make cuts, that is not typical, but Brockton High is not a typical high school."
Also atypical is the success of the historic program. With great success comes great expectations, and Colombo acknowledges that being a high school football coach is becoming a year-round, full-time job.
"We're working on football, I think our kids that play are very focused on football," Colombo said. "Just doing it three months out of the year is not adequate. We're working at it, whether it be offseason, preseason or in season."
Ultimately, parents play a very important role in the success of a high school football program. They are the ones who form the community around the sport, work in the athletic charity groups, attend the games and volunteer.
"When you get the parents that are involved for all the right reasons, your season usually goes well," Tripp said. "More often than not, if that's the case, then you'll have winning teams."
It's not all hectic. At some schools, football is the same as the rest, just another sport.
"All the sports take up a lot of time, not just football," von Euw said. "Every year is a challenge, but you have a lot of faith in your coaches that they are going to run their program right."
Despite cost, time and what may seem like a lot of work, Friday night will come off without a hitch next week. It can be counted on, it always does.
Knowing the lengths these people went through to put Friday night together adds a bit of perspective to the game. At least until kickoff.
