Fun Versus Funds
Rockhurst High School, the Jesuit preparatory school located on the Missouri side of 93rd and State Line, is selling five-game football season tickets this year for $125. It is the first time a Kansas City high school has sold reserved season tickets for football.
You can see a full home season of college ball for less. The University of Kansas sells a six-game package in the North Bowl for $99. University of Missouri fans can buy a seat in the south stands for the Tigers’ six home games for $116.
Yet Rockhurst’s schedule might be worth $25 a pop. The Hawklets will open against two of the best teams in the state: Blue Springs South and Blue Springs. They’ll also entertain teams from Houston and Dallas. On the road, Rockhurst visits Joliet, Illinois, and Edina, Minnesota.
After years of having one of the more spartan high-school football programs, Rockhurst has pulled ahead in the arms race that apparently began at Blue Springs High School during the 1980s and ’90s. The combination of high-quality athletes and a community that was willing to put its money behind its high-school football programs catapulted the Blue Springs football teams to prominence. The weight rooms at both Blue Springs South and Blue Springs rival many area college facilities.
Across the state line, the Olathe District Activity Center features one of the largest football stadiums in the area. Crowds are so thick there on autumn Friday evenings that some high schools have prohibited live game broadcasts for fear fans might avoid the mayhem and stay home.
Metro Sports pays no rights fees to broadcast local high-school games live. The same is true for WHB 810, which carries a high-school game of the week each Friday night. Both Metro Sports and 810 sell advertising for their high-school programming and profit from carrying the games. It is not far-fetched to expect high-school conferences to band together and take bids from local competing cable networks and radio stations for the right to broadcast their football games. The NFL and college football have received financial windfalls from cable licensing, and the local high-school game may likewise become a serious revenue-producing business.
Will the ills that plague college football seep down to high school? Television and postseason bowl games pump millions of dollars into college budgets each year, but the players are paid nothing. It doesn’t make sense that Mark Mangino’s total five-year contract at Kansas will bring him millions of dollars while his players toil for tuition and books.
The salaries for area high-school football coaches remain in line with what most other teacher/coaches are paid, but the same was true not long ago in the college game. Rights fees, shoe contracts and fan interest have expanded many colleges’ coaching salaries into seven figures. All this money heaps loads of pressure on college coaches and administrators to win. It is no longer acceptable to have a bad football season in the Big 12. The stakes are too high and the money too important.
It would be a shame to see that happen at the high-school level. Contractors are working feverishly at Rockhurst to have the $7 million renovation of the school’s football stadium and outdoor sports facilities finished in time for the home opener on September 21. Rockhurst’s Vincent P. Dasta Memorial Stadium is now the crown jewel of area high-school football venues.
A glistening new 5,000-seat east grandstand looks down on the city’s only state-of-the-art artificial-turf field. “I feel like I’m moving fast even when I’m walking on this stuff,” says Tony Temple, Rockhurst’s star junior running back. So too are area high-school football teams moving fast toward the artificial world of big-money athletics.
