Without big ticket sales, pandemic is cutting deep into athletic budgets
On the one hand, it was expected to rain Thursday morning, so maybe a bunch of Thanksgiving football games would move off the holiday anyway. Some would shift up to Wednesday night before folks headed out to bars or parties. A handful of games might tick back to Friday.
On the other, those games still draw crowds when a pandemic doesn’t lead the state’s governing body to cancel the high school tackle football fall season. Those crowds still pump thousands of dollars into the coffers of athletic departments that might be feeling a pinch from that same pandemic.
COVID-19 has taken a massive toll in many more significant ways than in high school athletics. But the pandemic has canceled spring sports, limited fall sports, kept crowds down or eliminated them completely, and now has delayed winter sports at least until Jan. 19. It all that has an effect on schools’ cash flow.
A year without ticket sales could cost one twoschool city almost $100,000, while other schools wait to see how town decisions will affect their future budgets.
“In our district, it’s had a huge impact financially,” Hamden athletic director
Tom Dyer said.
“Districts are trying to find ways to pay for a safe regular school day. That money’s got to come from somewhere.”
For many schools, Thanksgiving football (or Thanksgiving Eve football, or some kind of late-season rivalry game) brings a crowd that injects some capital into an operating budget, though perhaps not as much as it used to.