Hockey Team Requests School Funding

 

  “The hockey team brought in about 2,200 fans to one game last year. That’s more than football, soccer, or basketball [have] ever brought,” said junior defenseman Jon Gorman.

  “Being in the budget would be worth it for the school.”

  After playing a nearly-perfect season and almost taking last year’s championship title, South Kingstown Rebel Hockey proved itself as a force to be reckoned with.

  Their successes allowed them to move into Division II, in which the periods are longer and the overall skill level of opponents is higher.

  “Division II is a lot faster paced than Division III. You have to be able to read and react quicker than you would in Division III,” senior and captain Dan Morrissey stated.

  “We definitely have to work harder, it’s a whole new league with all new teams and players.”

  However, with ice-time costing $180 per fifty minutes rather than an hour, extra practice is simply impossible for the only team that isn’t funded by the school.

  A hockey program generally costs between $10,000 and $20,000 each year, which includes ice time, transportation, coaching salaries, and insurance. In South Kingstown, ice time alone costs between $13,000 and $15,000 a year. “The prices keep going up,” Morrissey said.

  To subsidize the costs, the hockey team at SKHS uses fundraisers, such as car washes, selling pizza cards, and an annual golf tournament, which covers most of the cost of ice.

  The North Kingstown High School Athletic Department fundraises as well. According to the Providence Journal, the school district had undergone extreme budget cuts the previous year, specifically in its athletic department. This past August, the school held an annual 5K race, which lended an adequate amount of fiscal support to its budget.

  Enough money was raised to provide two middle school track programs with all of the necessary funding. The race also provided for boy’s tennis t-shirts and wrestling singlets. Outside of the athletic department, the school also purchased drums for Wickford Middle School’s band.

  Mr. Gibbons, head coach of the team, and Mr. Lynch, athletic director, recently brought the issue to a committee meeting in November.

  According to the South County Independent, Lynch emphasized that the programs at North Kingstown and Prout are completely funded, including equipment, coaching salaries, ice time, and transportation. The proposed solution included equipment, coaching salaries, and transportation, leaving the booster club to cover only the costs of ice time. 

The committee did not vote on the matter, but Superintendent Hicks urged members to find where the budget increase would come from, in what is predicted to be a difficult fiscal year.

  Many schools across the country face similar problems. In Buffalo, New York, board-member Eileen Rucker questioned whether adding hockey to the budget was a feasible option.

 “[Hockey] is as expensive, if not more so, than football. Can we afford a sport as expensive as football?”

  The underlying issue is that sports have expanded so much over the years.

  Title IX states that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

  The most commonly cited effect of this article is the added amount of athletic opportunities for females, though there is no specific reference to athletics at all.

  Title IX, many say, also requires colleges to provide a proportional number of scholarships to students, which benefits both males and females. After Title IX was instituted, sports funding in secondary schools and collegiate settings rose dramatically, as well as the number of sports available to all students.

  In South Kingstown, the program started in 2003, each year bringing more success.

  “A sport that has this much publicity should be more appreciated by the school,” said Gorman.

  In Fairfield, Ohio, an enormous number of extracurricular activities were cut from the budget in 2004, including the football team, marching band, and National Honors Society. A student told USA TODAY that, “[the students] were in a world of hurt¼can we really be a school if we don’t have football or a band or Spanish Club?

  Fairfield’s solution was a “pay-to-play” plan. Similar to most recreational sports, the students are required to pay for their participation in athletic programs. A USA TODAY survey noted that 34 states have at least one district that charges their students to play. The number of public schools that have implemented the system is steadily increasing.

  The survey found that, in Kansas, 18 percent of the state’s 302 school districts are “pay-to-play”. The number had grown from 29 to 55 in the last three years.

  Morrissey believes that “the team should definitely be put into the budget. Over the past years, the team has grown so much. [It] doesn’t happen often that a team that funds itself is able to compete and win against teams that have been around and fully funded for a while.”