When I was in high school I was tasked with writing a paper on a school issue and I wrote about how school budget was being disproportionately favored towards the football team and other sports in general. At the time, Colorado had laws in place that made it so anyone with the desire could request budget information for public schools and how they were used.
My mom had done that. Printed off like 80 pages of budget reports. We found staggeringly huge money wastes. The football team had hired a retired NFL coach (not cheap) as a second string coach. Instead of using the county approved vendors, the Poms team had their uniforms custom made at Victoria secret because the pomp’s coach worked there on weekends but the price was like three times that of the approved vendor.
I brought some of these points up in my paper in discussion how other extracurriculars like theater, band, etc had to have boosters to be able to afford basic necessities (theater had asked for some extra dividing walls that could be used to partition the choir room to allow for boys and girls to change in privacy instead of in the open like we usually did but were denied because it wasn’t in our budget). I was told by my teacher it was incorrect and I needed to cite sources and not “libel” programs at our school with baseless accusations. I brought in the forms printed off the next day and was told I was being snotty and vindictive and that those programs helped bring in money from the state because our football team was so good.
The band room had instruments from the 70s that were falling apart. The theater department didn’t have a budget for set design so the director spent it out of her own pocket to get screws and wood. There were ACADEMIC clubs that had to be cancelled because there wasn’t money to pay teachers the overtime to be sponsors after school. The school’s television program, which ran the daily announcements, operated with some of the most ancient tech. Again, because their budgets had been slashed in favor of sportsball kicking.
Teacher was a sponsor for one of the sports that had just recently gotten brand new uniforms despite the fact the old ones were only about 3 years old. I was livid about being shoved off. I didn’t care that the football team making state helped with some sponsorships—they didn’t need to be dumping money into professional NFL coaches. The Poms team could have done a booster to get the fancy uniforms. It was ridiculous. I ended up going to a school board meeting and asking why on earth this was acceptable.
Well. Apparently it was not and not being monitored because the following year the principal (who was so avidly pro sports you would have thought she assumed school academics were an annoying side purpose for public education dollars) was asked to retire. Can’t fire teachers or administrators easily thanks to the unions which have their upsides but seriously so much shitty behavior was covered up by that. It ended up leveling off and the next year we got more money in the budgets for other extracurriculars but I won’t ever forget the attitude I got for trying to expose the grifting done for sports over academics or “nerdy” extracurriculars.
Karma got it though, the following year we sold out every damn night of our production of West Side Story and made back our budget and then some.
Sports are important, don’t get me wrong but the privilege they are afforded, the lack of accountability at the top, and the turning of eyes in favor of making wins is sickening and it goes beyond just college level athletics.
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