High cost of gas has some high schools re-thinking sports travel

[trublue 939]

ajc.com > Sports > High school

GEORGIA HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS

 

Gas prices have Georgia schools rethinking sports travel

Cobb spent $450K on transport in '07-'08, expects 20-25% cost hike this year

 

By TODD HOLCOMB

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 07/01/08

With diesel fuel prices 34 percent higher than they averaged in 2007-08, the state of Mississippi has cut high schools sports schedules by 10 percent. The state of Tennessee is radically changing its league structure to limit cross-state travel.

 

In Georgia, there is currently no plan to address rising fuel prices that could cost each high school thousands of dollars more in the upcoming academic year. However, officials want ideas to cope with the issue.

 

"Do we have to do something drastic? If we don't, I'm not sure we'll be out there traveling," said Earl Etheridge, chairman of the Georgia High School Association's reclassification and football committees. "Gasoline's getting to be a tough situation. It's the responsibility of schools to do their fair share to decrease the number of trips we have."

 

Ideas discussed at the reclassification committee's meeting last month included cutting back junior varsity and freshman schedules, playing more double-headers and tournaments and even adopting the Tennessee plan so that neighboring schools can compete against each other in the same region regardless of enrollment size or classification.

 

Exactly how much more money school systems will spend to bus their sports teams in 2008-09 is hard to quantify, but most estimates put it in the thousands of dollars per high school.

 

Cobb County, which has 16 high schools, spent $450,000 on sports transportation in 2007-08, according Jay Dillon, Cobb's director of communications. The county expects to spend 20-25 percent more, or about $100,000, in the coming year. That's about $6,000 extra per high school.

 

With 22 sports sanctioned by the GHSA, high schools can field dozens of teams at the varsity through freshmen levels. For example, Buford, which has 28 sports teams, took more than 200 road trips in 2007-08.

 

Loganville, a middle-sized school east of metro Atlanta, typically spends $30,000 to $35,000 on transportation each year, according to athletics director Tommy Stringer, who nixed a holiday basketball trip to Florida last year because of rising costs.

 

The average price of diesel fuel, which powers school buses that get only 6-10 miles per gallon, is now around $4.65 — 34 percent higher than the $3.48 average for the '07-08 school year. It was only $2.85 when school started last August, according to the Energy Information Administration.

 

But only a few school systems are planning to restrict their schools from sports travel.

 

One is Troup County in west Georgia, which now will pay for only 150 miles per trip. The school's athletic departments must fund the rest.

 

That means that Troup High's football trip to Washington County — 450 miles on three buses — will cost the athletics department about $425. The county will pay the rest, about $200.

 

For one trip, that's no big deal, athletics director and football coach Bubba Jeter said. But it can add up when multiplied by several sports.

 

"It's going to get interesting when we get around to baseball," he said. "This [past spring], we had to go to South Carolina, to Augusta. Then when you get into the playoffs. That's when it's going to get expensive."

 

In May, at the request of the state's superintendents, Mississippi reduced by 10 percent the number of varsity contests that its public schools may schedule.

 

Herb Garrett, the executive director of Georgia's superintendents association, said he would meet with GHSA executive director Ralph Swearngin this month in Jekyll Island to discuss transportation concerns.

 

"The fallout [in Georgia] for sports, my guess, is it would occur at the sub-varsity level, where all of sudden have to look at how many JV, freshman, eighth-grade games you need to play," Garrett said "I'm sure that will become issue as price of gas continues to become a hot topic."

 

In the meantime, school systems may act on their own.

 

In 2005, when gas prices first passed $3 per gallon, a few schools, including Columbus and Westside-Macon, canceled one or more JV football games.

 

This summer, a school district in Fort Mill, S.C., voted to charge high school and middle school athletes $50 apiece to help pay transportation costs.

 

In Florida, a few school districts aren't letting their JV teams travel outside the county. The six-school St. Lucie district recently cut schedules 10 percent and eliminated middle school teams.

 

Lucia Norwood, executive director of the Georgia Athletic Directors Association, suggested more creative scheduling should be the first step, not cutting teams.

 

"Maybe put them all [JV and freshman teams] on one bus and play them all at the same time," Norwood said. "That would be more viable than doing away with programs for kids."

 

In Region 5-AAAAA, mostly in Cobb County, freshmen and JV football games will be played as double-headers this year, meaning only one school travels and their freshman and JV teams ride the same bus. Traditionally in Georgia, JV and freshmen games are played simultaneously at two sites, meaning twice the travel.

 

Another idea is to schedule more tournaments and double-headers in sports such as baseball and softball.

 

The most drastic solution would be to group schools more closely in regions. This year, in Georgia's Region 1-AAAA, schools are spread from Macon to Columbus to Bainbridge, making for some mandatory 300-mile round trips.

 

To address those kinds of problems, Tennessee has adopted a plan for football that groups bigger schools with smaller schools. Arkansas is considering combining its highest two classifications for similar reasons.

 

Doing that in Georgia could put neighboring schools such as Douglass (Class AAAAA) and Carver (AAA) in the same region but allow them to qualify for the state playoffs in their own classifications.

 

The GHSA's Swearngin said it's a radical idea but worth studying.

 

"There's no question that what it costs to drive a bus a mile these days is so costly that if we're spending all our money on transportation, you've got to cut it out somewhere else," Swearngin said. "Whether it's uniforms or the number of people you can carry on a team, it's a domino effect. It may be time now to recognize that the world has changed so radically that we may have to look for some new procedures."