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Cummings High School honors its 2020 seniors by illuminating the football field in April.
Times-News
Times-News
The financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are being felt across high school athletics departments in Alamance County.
So far, schools have been able to at least break even when it comes to finances.
With only cross country and volleyball currently competing in season, area public schools have found a way to make things work.
“I think right now, we're doing our best to break even,” Alamance-Burlington Schools athletics director George Robinson said. “Obviously, you don't need any officials for cross country. And volleyball, is kind of the one few times it's been able to subsidize itself.”
Cross country doesn’t require the extra expense of officials like most sports do, which has been a help. In volleyball, those schools that are able to sell their allotted 25 tickets per match have been able to at least bring in some revenue, even if it’s not much.
“With our combined volleyball official totals for one game, between junior varsity and varsity, we're looking at roughly $176,” Williams High School athletics director Todd Davis said. “With the limitation of 25 fans per game, if we sell 50 tickets, 25 and 25, we're making $250. We're netting $74, so that's very little when it comes down to it.”
Travel to certain schools for away matches tends to be a costly expense for many schools.
"If you sell all 25 tickets per contest, JV 25, varsity 25, you end up making about 40 bucks after you pay for the officials,” Eastern Alamance athletics director John Kirby said. “When you get on a bus to drive to McMichael, it costs $207 one way. I think any help that they can give us is going to be good. This is gonna be a year that we just got to try to break even.”
The North Carolina High School Athletic Association announced earlier this month it would be providing a total of $4 million of aid to its member schools to be divvied out to assist with finances during the pandemic.
“I think it'll be a tremendous help,” Southern Alamance athletics director Stephanie Smith said. “I think we're all struggling to make this year happen. And then I think next year, and the next year is when I think you're gonna see an even bigger impact, just simply because anybody that had money saved to do bigger projects moving forward, they're having to use that money this year to survive and to fund just being able to actually play games."
Alamance-Burlington Schools is also providing area athletic departments with additional zonal funds to assist, Robinson said.
“Our finance department has allocated more funds for athletics,” Robinson said. “So where each school was given a pot of money at the beginning of the year, to be able to subsidize our needs athletically, it could be equipment or uniforms. We can't use that to pay salary. But anything athletic related we're able to use those funds. And so since we are in the pandemic, and limited in regards to how many patrons we can have, our school system, or more importantly, our finance department has allocated some more funds for us to be able to do athletics in a financially responsible way.”
The biggest concern among many athletic directors is how things will play out in the new year when a whole slew of sports are scheduled to begin, notably basketball and football.
“It would be interesting to see what that looks like, with basketball with football, because we're going to have to have more officials and obviously, would have to pay for security,” Robinson said. “And so it would be interesting as well as transportation. We really haven’t been hit hard with that yet. So once we start filling multiple sports, that's going to need transportation, that's going to obviously eat into whatever subsidy that we're going to get, additionally, that we've already got from the school system is going to eat into that considerably. And then in regards to gate receipts, I don't know if we're gonna be able to make that up.”
Athletics departments depend on the money generated from football games, and often basketball, to provide the revenue needed to pay for other sports. If attendance is limited at those events due to COVID-19, it would be a significant hurdle for schools to make finances work.
“It’s only going to get more difficult,” Robinson said. “Volleyball, while it is critically important, and being able to get back to normal has helped a lot, but as we transition into basketball and football, and those two sports are basically our cash cows, to have a limited amount of people that are able to attend is always going to hurt us in terms of subsidizing other sports.
"We certainly understand and we'll certainly abide by the restrictions," Robinson continued. "We know why they're in place. However, not having an unlimited amount of fans is only going to hamstring us financially. ... And our finance department also understands that, hence the reason they are allocating more funds.”
Western Alamance athletics director Mike Pennington added: “All in all, I think, financially so far we're OK. I don't know what's going to happen when basketball and football start. We're only gonna have three varsity home football games.”
Due to the uncertain nature of how things will play out regarding finances, schools are focused on limiting their spending as much as possible.
“The mode that we’re in now is a need, not a want,” Kirby said. “We get exactly what we need and we’ll just kind of figure it out.”
In many cases that means holding off on certain projects or expenses schools had planned for before the pandemic began.
“Right now we're just really kind of trying to limit any spending, keep it as minimal as possible and really just try to make sure we're paying for officials and transportation and, and just kind of the day-to-day requirements that have to take place,” Smith said. “I know there are some teams that had some longer-term plans that they're kind of holding off on. Maybe they had money to purchase a new uniform but they're holding that money this year just to make sure that they can successfully get through their season ... with the economy like it is we want to be really careful about how much we ask for help from our community because we know that help is not as readily available as it is in a normal year.”
