By Rick Elmore
The Greenup Beacon
As basketball season gets underway across the state, athletic programs in Greenup County begin to assess the damage to their budgets following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Boards of education for each of the county’s three school districts helped offset some costs and may continue to do so after the teams lost money because of reduced attendance in an effort to curb the coronavirus outbreak.
“It had a major, major impact,” said Larry Coldiron, superintendent of the Raceland-Worthington school district. “Normally, we’d see $30,000-$40,000 having Pikeville, Ashland, Paintsville and Russell play here. This year we saw a fraction of that.”
Raceland head coach Mike Salmons declined to give an exact amount the high school brought in from football this year but said what it brought in was less than 50 percent of “what we anticipated this time last year.”
Raceland qualified for the 1A playoffs this season and managed to play 10 games this season, including five at home and one playoff contest. Raceland even hosted Paintsville twice during the year.
Added into the costs of playing football, was unexpected trips Raceland made to Washington County and to Danville to pick up extra games after COVID-19 positive tests forced the original opponents to cancel.
Tom Collins, principal and co-athletic director at Raceland, said money from football went to recondition equipment such as shoulder pads and helmets.
“It takes a lot of money to play football,” Collins said. “There’s the cost of painting the field and paying officials.”
At Greenup County, athletic director Matt Thompson said the school district will have to get creative in finding ways to increase cash flow after the Musketeers football season was limited to six games – two at home.
While the revenue from games was lost, the cost of having those games remained the same.
“I know we’re kind of walking the tightrope of how many people we’re allowed to have in,” Thompson said. “We just had our first home basketball game and $20 is all we made.”
To offset losses, Thompson said Greenup County had cameras mounted in the gymnasium so games could be aired on NFHS Network. By doing that, the school will receive a percentage of the subscriptions to see the Musketeers play, he said.
According to Thompson, future plans also include selling billboard ads that will mount to the top of the home bleachers at Greenup County’s football field so the ads can be seen by traffic on U.S. 23.
Greenup County Schools superintendent Traysea Moresea said the district has not reviewed losses incurred by reduced capacity during football season but added that the district is trying to put students first.
“The goal has been to keep everyone safe and we’re not looking at the losses,” Moresea said. “We were frugal in how we spent and most of our money spent was toward safety precautions.”
Moresea said those costs included masks that were given to those who did attend the football games, but also included extra cleaning supplies for the locker room and weight room.
Collins, Thompson and Joe Bryan, athletic director at Russell High School all said the percentage of reduced capacity was a number that came from Greenup County Health Department director Chris Crum.
Bryan said Russell was reduced to 50 percent capacity at Henry R. Evans Stadium though the number tightened as the season wore on.
For the Red Devils’ first round playoff game against East Carter, only 120 tickets were sold for each team.
“I don’t know that there’s any way to recoup the lost money,” Bryan said. “Even with basketball we’re at reduced capacity. It came on recommendation that we reduce our capacity to 15 percent for basketball.”
Each school has a booster club to support its athletic teams, and the athletic directors said fund raising is one of the ways some losses can be offset.
Bryan said at Russell, the athletic boosters will give him a budget prior to the start of the school year each year which is then divided among the teams.
At Raceland, Salmons said anything is on the table for the future.
“Hopefully, we can return to some normalcy in 2021,” the coach said. “If not, we’ll have to evaluate our options.”
Salmons said Raceland, like Greenup County, discussed options such as reaching out to businesses, but added businesses are struggling too.
“We’re going to have to be frugal with our money, but at the same time not put our kids safety at risk,” Salmons said. “We’ve got to be cognizant of what’s going on.”
