Madison Grenauer, Reporter
@MadisongCourant
The hype for a basketball game starts with the roaring of the bomb squad and the squeaking of sneakers on the shellacked hardwood floors. The excitement behind a hockey game grows with the cloud of white from the students in the stands. The somewhat unified energy of parents at a track meet brings the players some motivation as well. There is something about the excitement behind each move that keeps the supporters of all the different sports coming back each week.
Even though the hype at each game is powerful, there is something about it that just doesn’t match up with the overwhelming audience that appears every fall friday at football games. The crowd roars louder each time the buzzer rings, flour thrown from the bomb squad covers the bleachers in a white blanket. While the spectators of football may be a reflection of its popularity, some students believe that there might be a greater advantage to the team in terms of funding.
How are sports funded at the high school?
The athletic budget for the high school is financially supported by the by the New Canaan Board of Education. The programs are enriched by the All Sports Booster Club, which helps to raise money for funds dealing with equipment, additional coaches, and exercise rooms like the fitness center. Decisions on what to specifically use the funding from the Booster Club comes from the Athletic Director Jay Egan. Mr. Egan decides how many additional coaches the booster club will need to fund and where those coaches will go. The funding from the booster club is a substantial part of the Athletic Department’s funds that help support all CIAC teams at the high school.
Katherine Ong, the Vice President of Membership positions for the booster club, has thoroughly explained the booster clubs donations as well as the division of funds between each team. “We receive requests each month for specific items per sport,” Ms. Ong said. “That can be a timer for cross country, that can be a championship banner for the girls hockey team, or scoreboard updates or additions to score boards.”
In addition to specific item requests for each team, the booster club provides the funding for several coaches and their salary for each CIAC team. “On average we spend about $140,000 on coaches stipends. That is paying for additional coaches at the high school which is about 43% of all coaches. This fall we funded nine coaches for all sports,” Ms. Ong said.
The perception of funding at the high school
When asked if students believed whether sports funding at the high school was equally distributed, there was a variation in the responses. Varsity football Player Ryan Corbett shared his opinion with the Courant. “I think that some sports like football and lacrosse are definitely funded more than some other sports,” he said. “But at the same time those sports are also bringing in a lot more money through ticket sales etc., so I think it’s justified in the end.”
The Courant spoke to multiple sources who believed that the funding for sports at the high school is not equitable. “I do believe that the football program gets more funding than other sports,” said one Varsity football player Ethan Chalon.
To test this perception, the Courant investigated how sports are funded at NCHS. What we found is that funding is more complicated than it appears.
When looking at sports specifically after the given the money from the booster club, Athletic Director Jay Egan divides the donation based off of many different factors. For example, each team has different equipment costs, different amounts of participation, and different spaces that they need when practicing or playing games. “The number of Booster Club coaches is determined based on the number of players that are participating, track is a good example. There are two funded positions in track, but if you have 60 kids on the track team, you want more than a 30:1 ratio,” Mr. Egan said. “We have to get to a 20:1 ratio, so you have to hire another coach or maybe an additional coach. I determine [the funding]based on the number of athletes that are participating in the program.”
Breaking Down the Expenses of the Sports
When comparing the expenses for each team at the high school, football inevitably costs more than any other sport in all seasons. According to the 2018-2019 Athletic Department budget report on the NCPS website, the football team received $165,199 for 126 boys while the boys gold team received $20,466 with 14 boys. When the funding was divided into the price per player, the football team was $1,311 per player and the boys golf team was $1,462. The average cost per player for all the boys teams is $892.93.
The football team receives the most funding out of all of the sports, but when you divide the money among the players, they do not have the highest price per player. Some expenses that have gone into the football team this year are the equipment which costs $5,004, repairs which costs $17,061, supplies which costs $13,732, transportation which costs $22,359, and referees which costs $7,933. The golf team has fewer expenses such as transportation which costs $9,969, supplies which costs $1005, and referees which costs $370.
The breakdown for football costs requires a variety of different expenses. For example, a football helmet costs $400. And part of the reason for that is not only the cost of manufacturing it but also the insurance that the helmet carries. So there is a $10 million per occurrence on every helmet,” Mr. Egan said.
The insurance on football is extremely important, especially since there were “more than 41,000 injuries and 25 million athlete exposures from 2004 to 2009 [due to football],” as stated by the NCAA. In addition to the million dollar insurance rates, the required reconditioning of the equipment every year impacts the amount of money that must go into the sport as well. “And football equipment needs to be reconditioned and each year the football helmets have to have a seal on them to show they have been reconditioned in order for the liability insurance to stay in effect. There are large numbers in football, we have 135 or 145 boys,” Mr. Egan said.
Another factor of the expense to the game, and that is the transportation. “For example, if we were going to transport a team from here to Brian McMahon which is 3 miles away to play a JV game, it would cost about $550. So those costs add up really quickly. So when you put the cost of the equipment, the reconditioning of the equipment and the transportation with football, that is how the numbers get up high really fast,” Mr. Egan said.
The football team does have 7 uniforms. The team does have more uniforms than other teams. Some people believe that this is unnecessary, others believe that it adds to the culture and supports the players. “I don’t think we are that far off of what is the norm as far as everybody has whatever the school colors are, they usually have a gray uniform, then they use the gray uniform to mix and match with the rest of the uniform,” Mr. Egan said. “We have red, we have white, we have black, red and gray and we’ve got three pants, so that’s all we have. They also have a shelf life of probably five or six years, you know, so you use those uniforms for the lower level teams as well, so they last for a long time.”
The funding behind the teams is important with the economics behind the high school, but no matter what happens the football team will always have its history throughout New Canaan. “People come to watch football because they are events and they are on the weekend, they are on a Friday night and it’s once a week, so that whole aura around football leads people to believe that it is more important than other sports,” Mr. Egan said.
This story was edited from an original print version. The changes that have been made are within the quote, “People come to watch football because they are events and they are on the weekend, they are on a Friday night and it’s once a week, so that whole aura around football leads people to believe that it is more important than other sports,” the end of the quote was changed from saying “it is more important than it really is” to “it is more important than other sports. The second edit that was made comes from the first line in the third paragraph which now states, “The athletic budget for the high school is financially supported by the New Canaan Board of Education. The programs are enriched by the All Sports Booster Club,” before the paragraph was edited, it stated “The athletic budget for the high school is funded by the All Sports Booster club”. These edits were only changed on the website and not the printed version.
