Rod's Friday Take N Things

Fund Raising is an important part of sports anymore because it isn't getty any cheaper to play the game. Hockey. One of their bigger fundraisers of the year is tomorrow. Their annual Zamboni Days where the kids and usually a mom or dad or both go door to door selling Pepsi products with the funds raised going to help fund the program. So buy up a case or two since you get something pretty good in return for your money. Baseball. Go to the Post 8 baseball website and see the different funding mechanism's they have to fund 4 teams, pay coaches, umpires and things like that. They guestimate that a budget for 1 year nears $90 thousand dollars. It says on the website about 1/3 of that is for travel. I would guess that figure may be close to 1/2. That includes paying the bus company to transport the teams which one might think, you could cut cost by just getting parents to drive. Right? It isn't 1950 or 60 or 70 anymore. Players are selling raffle tickets. If they sell all of them, they basically don't have to pay to play. It's not like Sioux Falls or Rapid City where players get socked with a $750 to $1000 player registration fee, and then, in Rapid City's case, they still have to sell raffle tickets? Some of them are $1000 for a single ticket. Granted, you win a real nice prize, but my goodness. Pierre still does it pretty much the right way but you certainly ask a lot of the kids and the guys on the board that go out and do the selling. But it's for the kids. I am sure Soccer does things similarly and of course our high school teams still have their little fund raising things so the saying, there is no free lunch, still holds true. While we have a generous community when it comes to giving to these programs, one wonders when the time comes when alot of them, Hey, I only got so much to go around. And yet, if you want to be competitive, you got to do it. Because we all want to have a competitive team we put out there. And who knows maybe we are teaching our kids that they can become a salesperson when they grow up. Sounds better than panhandler.