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Reply to "Fund Raising"

Above and beyond what is required absolutely should be self funded.  Low income schools tend to do without or have the bare minimum or stretch what they have far beyond what they should.  Example would be I used to coach at a school outside of Louisville so we would sometimes run into teams who were low income.  Most of the time their uniforms were a hodge podge of uniforms from several different years.  They resembled one another but you could tell they had different uniforms on.  Several times I gave them buckets of balls as we left because the ones they had were pretty bad.  Helmets probably weren't safe or maybe met the bare minimum for safety. When talking to their coaches they all said they had to get their CDL license so they didn't have to pay for a driver.  The school system provided the bus and fuel but if they had to get a driver it would generally run about $20 per hour.  They never had JV teams.  Sometimes they would have hats of professional or college teams and not the school.

They were almost always great kids to be around who played as hard as they could.  Most weren't very good but you could see they had athletic ability but no clue about baseball.  Their coaches were normally the guy who got roped into it and rarely stayed for more than 2 years.  The stipends were terrible and the lack of winning is hard to put up with. 

They existed from fundraising, grants and stretching the budgets.  That school I was at survived on fundraising because I wasn't allowed to charge a gate since our field was at community park instead of school.  Luckily my student body had enough we could make it happen but if I had to buy a dozen game balls the school wouldn't pay for it - I had to raise that money or pay it out of my pocket, which I did quite a bit. 

So you ask how do they survive?  They just do.  They figure out ways to make it happen but the end result tends to be a very poor product.  I'm not saying we need to distribute money differently to even playing fields but folding the tents and quitting isn't the answer either.

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