interviewed by Dana Branham, editor-in-chief
The Roar talked to athletic coordinator David Raffield for his take on the role of sports at Consol and in the district.
What brings the community to a high school football game?
I think human beings are social in nature, and we want to be around people and find reasons be with others. A high school football game is a great event, because you’ve got the band, the drill, the cheer, the game itself–and then, you’re hanging out with friends. There’s no question that in this community, there’s a carry-over from A&M, where the tailgating and all of that is a big social event. There’s plenty of people that just go for that part of it, and never even go to the game. They just set up with all the TVs and watch it out there. It’s just a social, common thing within our society.
How does the funding for athletics programs work?
The school district creates budgets for the sports and for each area, and a lot of that is driven off of the differences between revenue sports and nonrevenue sports. There are some sports that are great sports, but you don’t make a dollar on them, and there are other sports that can turn in quite a big deposit. When you look at it, it’s amazing what we’re able to accomplish with a relatively small budget in the scope of things. Football is one of the few sports, too, that doesn’t just take money out of the budget, but we’re also able to give back.
In the past couple of years, we hear a lot about how when the budget is cut, it’s fine arts programs that suffer. When the school experiences budget cuts, how has the athletic program felt that?
We’ve got to be careful with what we order. We watch our budget and we’re careful about staying in the budget, as everybody is. It’s no different from your own checking account at home–you can only spend what you make. You hope that you’re going to get your same budgets from year to year. We’re conscious of that, we’re conscious of travel–there are some areas that you can adjust. Maybe you don’t travel as far [for away games and tournaments] and you don’t do overnight trips in some sports. A lot of our sports used to do three tournaments where they’d spend the night, and it’s dropped over the years to two, and may have to drop down again even further.
People talk about how football is always getting lots of funding, where other sports and fine arts programs aren’t. But contact sports (like football) require different, expensive equipment than other sports and programs. Would you say that the funding a sport like football receives is proportional to the costs of equipment it requires?
If you just look at what it takes to operate a sport per kid, football is way more expensive to have than anything else. A helmet’s $230, a good pair of shoulder pads are about the same. You’re dressing a kid out in about $600. The thing that people don’t realize, too, is that we reuse stuff. There’s people that, there’s no way that they’d let their kids use used cleats in some sports. They’re going to buy their own, every year, no matter what. That’s their thing, but we recycle everything. And you’ve got to, when you’re dealing with our numbers–we’ve got over 200 football players. Same with the injuries–we suffer so many more injuries than other sports do. We’ve got to have trainers all the time. We can’t have practice without a trainer there. Whereas, you can do almost every other activity with one student trainer, and a phone to get to somebody there. We wouldn’t have the [adult] trainers on campus if we didn’t have football on campus.
How do the boosters programs work?
The Tiger Club will raise some funds by selling some shirts and apparel and things like that, and they make a little bit of money off that. They run the concession stands, they run the selling the ads in the programs, that’s where we put our fundraising card money. That offsets all sports–it’s not specifically for football, that’s for all sports. And there’s a board of people who make those decisions on where that money goes. The Tiger Club actually also helps out with cheer and drill too.
