By Megan Griggs Posted October 14, 2009
For the first time ever Humboldt County athletes are being required to pay a $25.00 fee in order to play a sport. Pay-to-play, as it’s referred to, has been around for a couple of years now, and many schools in Nevada have started doing it, including Dayton, Fernley and Yerington.
Is it right to make the athletes pay just because the state is in a financial bind? Sure it’s only twenty-five dollars but if you’re in more than one sport the cost starts to add up. So if a student participates in football, basketball, and track they will be paying a total of $75 to the school just to play.
Next year you will probably see the pay-to-play fee go up, this is just a test-run price. The question is: how much are the schools willing to charge each student? A school in Massachusetts is charging athletes up to $300.00 per sport. That is a huge amount of money especially for a sport such as football that has so many kids on one team. If you had a team of just 50 athletes that would be a total of $15,000.00 income. Now of course it’s not likely that Lowry will charge $300.00 per athlete, but the fact that the fee will increase is ridiculous.
In a small community like Winnemucca, sports are a big thing, because you know every kid playing and Friday night games are a type of social bonding for people. So in reality pay-to-play not only affects the students playing but also the families of our community.
Sure the money helps pay for travel expenses and such, but it is not the athlete’s responsibility to come up with the money that the state decided to take away from our school’s sports. Haven’t we had enough cuts, such as cutting freshman volleyball, and cheerleading? I can only wonder what extreme our school will go to next in order to afford to keep sports around.
