‘Friday Night Luxe’

December 9, 2006

Morbo is on a top-secret mission today and won’t be able to share any words of wisdom, but were he were around, I’m pretty sure this story would drive him nuts.

On game days, football fan Tracy French pulls his SUV into a reserved parking spot and rides an elevator to a stadium suite outfitted with plush seats and a big-screen TV.

His team is the Panthers — the Cabot High School Panthers of Cabot, Ark. Mr. French is the president of a local bank that has given about $65,000 to the school’s athletic department over the past five years, and the luxury seats are one of the perks he gets in return. “I would never have thought they’d have these types of facilities,” he says.

Yes, at a time when public schools across the country are facing incredible financial pressures, and bake sales, car washes, and raffles routinely try and help supplements meager budgets, high school football programs are getting the kind of money once reserved for major Div. 1 college football. A school in Georgia spent more than $2 million — in public funds — to build a fieldhouse with eight air-conditioned skyboxes. Three high schools in Texas share a new $18.3 million, 12,000-seat stadium.

Luxury skybox projects, million-dollar scoreboards, million-dollar turf upgrades, and million-dollar practice facilities are now available in some parts of the country for high school football games.

I had no idea.

The cost of running a big-time high-school football program at some schools is rising quickly. Top teams in big football states such as Texas and Georgia say they spend $100,000 to $350,000 on their programs annually, although the real costs can be higher. Those figures don’t include, for example, coaches’ salaries — those are paid by the district, because coaches also teach.

Private money now accounts for a substantial portion of football funding at many schools. Sources include everything from booster fund-raisers to stadium naming rights and corporate sponsorships. Money raised through private channels goes to salary supplements for coaches, chartered travel and debt payments on bigger projects such as weight rooms, field houses, scoreboards and the latest artificial turf, which can cost $1 million to install. (States and school districts have rules that generally prohibit boosters from giving money or gifts to players.) In some cases, stadiums and other major projects are funded with tax revenues.

When math and science classes have “boosters,” I’ll feel a little better about our collective priorities.

There’s an infrastructure that underlies all these luxuries and that is paid for by the taxpayers. Luxury boxes for High School???

I don’t like to make comparisons with the Fall of the Roman Empire, but jeez this a skewed up situation.

Thanks CB.

  • Yeah, Americans have their priorities straight alright. Straight up their (nevermind).

    What’s really aggravating to me about the glorification of football is the long-term effects it has on many if not most of the players. Most of the kids who play get injured eventually, most not seriously, but many are very seriously injured. Some are paralyzed or even killed. And for what? So people can watch them play a stupid game?

    Football is fun to watch, but I know many people who used to play in high school, and they all have “trick knees” or bad backs, which can directly be attributed to the abuse they took on the field. I never played football (except for fun) and I can lift a box of books, unlike my football playing friends, who traded their long-term health for the glory of Friday night lights.

  • No offense, CB, but what rock have you been living under for the last 20 or so years? Athletic programs have been getting more money than science, arts, English, et al. for decades. It’s all part of the American psyche at this point, and has been for some time.

    When we (as a nation) start to embrace intellectual pursuits more than athletic ones, I will finally have hope again.

  • I used to be good friends with a long-term Dean at my university. Herb’s was the task of obtaining most of the federal money we got for research and signing off on any university committment to any research project undertaken by any faculty member. His work required him to make frequent trips to the District of Columbia, which he always referred to as “New Rome”. NYC was “New Sodom”, LA “New Gomorrah”, and the creme of Higher Education institutions were referred to collectively as “New Athens”.

    Stories like this one merely confirm my late friend’s overall assessment of American culture. Like ancient Rome, we can solve many engineering problems and could (in the past anyway) win amazingly costly wars. But we get all our creative and scientific ideas, our plastic and lively arts and now even our labor from elswhere. I wonder what that luxury suite in Cabot, Arkansas, will do for any of Cabot High School’s students or teachers, except serve as a constant reminder of what very little value our society places on education (no matter how much money we spend).

  • I agree it does not represent my set of priorities….

    On the other side of the coin small town America is enamored with their HighSchool Football teams. Football is the main event for many communities…so if looked at from that perspective it might explain why this was so well funded…it is the community’s entertainment and adrenalin raising unifier.

  • Well said Ed. Let’s all get behind encouraging Charlie Rangel to take up where Bill Thomas left off and have the House Ways and Means committee push to lift the tax-exempt status of the NCAA and Div. I-A. athletic programs. USAToday has the story here. You can read Thomas’ letter to Miles Brand the head of the NCAA here. And you can read the NCAA’s response here(pdf).

    I’d like to share part of Brand’s response to the letter.

    “The fundamental purpose of intercollegiate athletics is the education of student-athletes in both the classroom and on the field or court,” Brand wrote in a 25-page response, made public Wednesday, to the House Ways and Means Committee. “The scale of the sport does not alter the fundamental purpose.”

    I wonder if he was referring to all the opportunities that Miami football players have to learn about our great American judicial system.

  • “When math and science classes have “boosters,” I’ll feel a little better about our collective priorities”

    That’s never going to happen–the point of all this money spent on sports is to make us MORE stupid, not less. Making a star out of a math whiz–don’t be daft

  • American public education has, for many years now, preached the mantra of “geting back to basics.” Anything that’s evn remotely asociated with the arts is subject to total defunding, on account of the American public school’s inherent need to “get back to the basics.”

    They just didn’t want to tell people that “getting back to basics” was the athletic department’s idea.

    The sadder part of it all is that the parents of these kids have allowed it to become the norm-referenced standard. If a school district is tight for cash and needs to pas a levy, the one guaranteed way to get that levy through is threatening to take down the goal-posts, cut down the hoop-nets, and put home plate away in a closet somewhere. STUPID PARENTS will vote “no” if the money is for teachers’ salaries, building improvements, and textbooks—but they’ll turn out in droves to support the sports program.

    Makes homeschooling and those virtual charter schools look pretty tempting, doesn’t it now?

  • Isn’t it time we made professional sports at least pay for the cost of their de facto farm programs, namely our high schools and colleges?

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