Wes Ferguson

Let’s commercialize high school sports

Pat Collins is a salty old coach, a booster backslapper, a guy whose powers of persuasion can open wallets around town.

He wants the best for his kids, and he knows how to get it. For proof, just look at the fancy scoreboards at Longview High School.

At a cost of $500,000, a jumbo video screen greets the football fans who pack Lobo Stadium, and a digital scoreboard keeps tally on games inside Lobo Coliseum. And if half a million dollars seems like a lot of money to track sports scores, well, keep in mind that not a dime of the 2008 purchase came from taxpayer money.

“I have six big-time sponsors,” said Collins, the school’s director of extracurricular activities.

Those six sponsors are among the most prominent businesses in Longview, and they agreed to more than split the annual cost of the five-year note. In return, the six are featured in advertisements adorning the football scoreboard and on large signs above the stadium’s visitor section.

“They’re contributing because they want to — because they know what we’ve got is good,” Collins said.

Indeed, plenty of people are willing to pay top dollar for their Lobos, considered by many to be the top Class 4A football team in the state.

What the Lobos have got is good — really good. There’s money to be made, and that brings us to an idea so tacky, so taboo, and going so far against the grain of high school sports, that Collins and others don’t even want to consider it.

But they should.

It’s time for the program to get paid.

Belt-tightening budgets

High school football casts a strange spell over people.

A winning team is among the highest of priorities for many parents and fans, but state funding for schools has not kept pace with rising costs, and many high school athletic programs are making do with less.

“Our school districts are having to tighten their belts,” acknowledges D.W. Rutledge, executive director of the Texas High School Coaches Association. “It doesn’t just affect athletic programs, but athletic programs are among the first to see cuts. Those are concerns, of course.”

In Longview, district administrators cut the athletic department’s budget by 15 percent in the 2008-09 school year. Despite ever higher costs for food, fuel and supplies, the cuts were not restored in the coming year’s budget.

“I meet coaches every year,” Collins said, “and I tell them one thing: This is your budget. Don’t overspend it, and if you do, you better start selling some M&Ms (holding fundraisers).

“We try not to go into the hole. We don’t like it, but if we do, we do,” he said. “If I cut anything, generally I cut football. That softball program is just as important to those mamas and daddies as that football program is.”

To ease the pain when his budget was slashed, Collins said he turned to his athletic booster clubs. The boosters are groups of parents and other supporters whom Collins began cultivating when he was hired as athletic director and head football coach in 2000.

There’s a different booster club for each sport. The football boosters contribute about $30,000 to the team’s annual budget, according to head coach John King, who inherited the position from Collins in 2004.

“If it wasn’t for our boosters, we wouldn’t make it,” King said.

“I mean, you can,” added Collins, “but suddenly you look up and you’ve got old shoes on, you’ve got raggedy T-shirts. That’s not the image I want the Lobos to project. I want them to be classy. We expect it, and the fans expect it of us. They don’t want anything to be second-class.”

Inside the Lobo Den

And yet, some things about the Lobos are second-class.

Not to encourage an East Texas arms race, but Longview High School’s aging Lobo Den crumbles in comparison to the lavish locker rooms in football-crazy Gilmer, Tatum and Carthage. In the Lobo Den, there are no rows of flat screen TVs above the players’ lockers.

Each school district has different priorities, of course, and the merits of all those flat screens are up for debate. Still, as budgets are increasingly squeezed, high school athletic directors might eventually come around to the idea of new revenue streams.

For ideas, they can look to their brethren at the college level.

Tickets, please

Ticket sales are the quickest way to make money, according to Adrian Buchet, executive director of Texas A&M’s Center for Sport Management Research and Education.

“Ticket sales here at A&M and most colleges are tied into donations,” Buchet said. “If you want to sit on the 50-yard line, you have to give not only the price of the tickets, but you have to give to the 12th Man Foundation,” the school’s athletic booster club.

“Colleges have been doing it for years. If you want a better seat, you have to give them more money.”

After ticket sales, the next-biggest money maker is the sale of media rights and sponsorships, most commonly through TV and radio spots, but also like the signs above the visitor seats at Lobo Stadium.

To sell the ads to pay for Longview’s new scoreboards, Collins convinced six local businesses — Texas Bank and Trust, Peters Chevrolet, Good Shepherd Medical Center, the Made Rite Co., Chick-Fil-A, and the Diagnostic Clinic of Longview (in partnership with Longview Regional Medical Center) — to fork over big bucks.

“I had to hustle for it,” Collins said. “You don’t walk in and say, ‘Hey, I need (a lot of money).’ It’s something you cultivate as you go along. You develop relationships. After they know who you are and you know who they are, you say, ‘Here’s what we want to do, and will you help us?’ We had to work to get to that point where we could go to them and ask them.”

Connecting with sponsors and boosters is a big part of his job, Collins added.

“It’s not like it’s all I do all day,” he said, “but I have to maintain my contacts.”

That Lobo craze

Collins doesn’t like the idea of raising ticket prices, however. Season seats cost $35, and tickets purchased the day of the game are $8 for reserved seats or $6 for general admission.

“I could do that, and I promise I’d sell them all,” Collins said. “But I just don’t think that’s the thing we need to be doing right now in tough economic times. We have season ticket holders who have had their seats for 50 years.”

Ticket sales to home games generate $45,000 to $50,000, he said.

In the neighboring White Oak Independent School District, officials have floated another idea to raise money — trademarking the school’s logo. Collins said he also has considered a trademark for Longview’s “Rockin’ L” logo, but not in recent years.

“When I got here 10 years ago and saw the popularity of the Rockin’ L, I asked about it, and I wish I had done it because in 10 years we would have received a lot of money on that Rockin’ L,” he said. But, “here’s the important thing: I want to see it on kids. I want to see it when I go downtown or to Wal-Mart or to the restaurant. I like to see the Rockin’ L.

“We’ve got that Lobo craze right now,” he said. “People want to see them Lobos, and I don’t want to take anything away from that.

“I probably should have, but I didn’t pursue it. That might be a project for the next folks who come in.”

Crunching the numbers

It’s probably too much to ask a high school program to break even, much less turn a profit.

With a budget of $520,000, the Longview athletic program returns about $400,000 in revenue to the school’s general fund. On its face, that seems like an easily surmountable gap, but those budget figures don’t tell the full story: They don’t include the salaries for Collins, his coaches and other assistants, which are drawn from a different fund.

Even in the college realm, only 15 percent of football programs are profitable, Buchet said. And that’s just football, he added, not taking into account the sports such as track and softball that don’t draw many spectators and don’t have a prayer of profitability.

What’s more, many educators decry the encroachment of commercial interests in college athletics.

“In the college world, commercialization is a bad word, and at the high school level it’s (even more so). They don’t want to have those ties,” Buchet said. “What do you want to do — keep growing and get in bed with sponsors, or leave it as it is?

“We’re not here for for-profit companies to use us as marketing vehicles … You have to maintain that line of integrity, but that’s tough to do with rising costs, and money has to come from somewhere.”

Big-time athletics

At the junior high and high school level, Collins said his 1,950 student athletes keep his hands full, and making money is not a high priority.

“I don’t think that should be the primary purpose of an athletic program. It’s all part of the education process,” Collins said. “I don’t think we need to get in the situation in high school where we look at it strictly from a moneymaking standpoint like big-time athletics.”

Rutledge, the director of the state coaches’ association, also said his peers haven’t been mulling new strategies to raise funds from boosters and other sources.

Maybe it’s time they start.

On a recent summer day, Collins met with Longview High’s boys basketball coach Hosea Lee. They were already talking about funding for the annual Leroy Romines Holiday Hoopfest, a basketball tournament held in December.

“That sumbitch costs money, I tell you,” Collins said. “If we find a major sponsor, we got no problems.

“Five thousand dollars — that would be all we need.”

Published August 17, 2009, in the Longview News-Journal

Wes Ferguson

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