Zelda Reif
Sports funding plays a large role in providing for sport teams. From uniforms to equipment, umpires to assistant coaches, everything that makes up the team requires some form of funding. However, some sports get significantly more funds compared to others.
Money to support Aragon athletics comes through two different avenues: the district and the Aragon sports booster club.
“There’s a pot of money from the district that pays stipends,” said athletic director Steve Sell. “But the number of assistant coaches per sport is dependent on the [booster] union vote, and the union decides that in the union contract.”
In addition to covering the stipends for the assistant coaches, the district also pays for essential items of a sport, or items that are absolutely necessary for a sport to function properly. For example, badminton cannot be played without birdies, so birdies are essential items for badminton and are therefore paid for by the district. However, the district does not pay for non-essential items like a softball pitching machine. Though helpful to the team, it is not absolutely vital for the game to function properly. If a sport wants a non-essential item, the coach must submit an application to the sports booster club.
“You’d want to do your research on what product you want so that you’re getting a good product, and then you have to go to a booster club meeting,” said former badminton coach Linda Brown. “You should have two representatives that are there to help bolster your proposition for whatever equipment that you’re going to get. And then the booster club votes on whether or not they approve the use of the funds.”
The booster club also pays the salaries for the assistant coaches, which is different from the stipends covered by the district.
“The board votes for what it thinks is going to serve the most kids, so a big chunk of their budget is to pay for assistant coaches and a strength coach for all the sports,” Sell said.
With salaries rising dramatically over the years, the booster club must raise enough money to keep up.
Sportsmanship nights are mandatory meetings for parents of student athletes that take place at the start of the fall, winter and spring seasons to encourage families to donate to the sports booster club.
“Most of the money that the boosters club comes up with is done at the athletic sportsmanship nights,” Sell said. “We have three of those and that is almost all of the money that’s raised.”
Though the pool of money can be requested by all sports, some sports still get more than others. When looking at the sport expenditures for every sport at Aragon, football stands out as the most expensive sport by a long shot with a budget of over $60 thousand for the 2021-22 school year.
“Football is an expensive sport,” said junior tennis player Keiya Wada. “But I feel like the district can make more effort to improve [facilities for] our sport [too.]”
Sell addresses the concerns around football spending.
“I knew immediately that the fact that I coached football and was the athletic director, the assumption [would be] that I’m going to take all the money and guide it towards football at the expense of most sports,” Sell said. “Which is … prejudicial and it’s ignorant. An athletic director doesn’t have final approval on any expenditure. The final stamp of approval comes from the principal and then from the district office. So this idea that I’m sitting behind this office, spending money the way I want to spend it, is a false narrative. Nobody prioritizes [certain] sports, whether it’s my office, the district office or the boosters club.”
The variation in the expenditures is due to a multitude of factors, such as team size, number of essential items, and officials and umpires.
“There’s some sports that aren’t expensive.” Sell said. “Tennis isn’t; they don’t have officials or use buses. They don’t ask for much, so we have to be creative [with] finding things that we could get for them.”
However, athletes’ experiences with the quality of their facilities don’t always align with the administration’s perspective.
“We don’t get enough funding,” Wada said. “The courts [are] cracked and sloped, so the balls roll over to the other courts. Also, we need lights, especially in the fall when night comes quicker. Lighting is a crucial part of tennis. It’s an outside sport, so when it gets dark we have to stop playing early.”
The process to obtain funding is complicated by the required layers of communication, between athletes, their coaches and the athletic director, who presents the proposal to the boosters club board for approval, before finally receiving the money.
