Coaches coping with cash crunch

Updated: May 14, 2011 9:38PM

Mike Cronkhite was predisposed to leave for Orlando at some point in his professional career. He had vacationed down there and he loves to play golf.

A scratch golfer, the 29-year-old former coach of the Crown Point girls basketball team — a fixture as a coach and administrator in this area for five years — even has picked out the course he is going to play next year in between his job as a teacher and the boys basketball coach at Freedom High School, a school of 3,200 in Orange County that competes in Class 6A, the largest division, in Florida.

His timetable for leaving the area became more urgent when he was one of 16 coaches/teachers that received a letter saying they could be part of a reduction in force in the Crown Point school district (48 total employees received them) if the corporation didn’t receive additional funding sources for next year.

Cronkhite did a lot of soul searching before he made the move. The letter helped push him over the edge.

“It was definitely tough,” he said. “All the teachers my age were the ones getting RIF letters. They are the ones that could lose their jobs.”

Crown Point saved the jobs at the ballot box, voting to pass a property tax increase of what amounts to roughly $250 per year on a house that has an assessed value of $190,000. That amounts to $5 million per year for the seven-year referendum.

That didn’t, however, prevent Cronkhite from heading south.

The twist for Cronkhite is that he is taking a job in a school system that just passed the same kind of referendum that Crown Point did to keep its district running at its current staffing levels.

Cronkhite’s departure left athletic director Bill Dorulla with two openings to fill: a girls golf coach position and the girls basketball job.

An internal candidate likely will fill the girls basketball job. Same with the golf job, assuming it’s a teacher. Used to be that the heavy financial lifting for schools was predicated on property taxes. Now, with property taxes that by law can only be raised with a referendum, the state sales tax is used to offset some of the rising costs that schools face. With the economy tanking, the revenue coming in from the sales tax hasn’t been stable enough for athletic directors to know what the trickle down affect is for them.

“There are going to be a lot of changes in public education because of this financial crisis,” Dorulla said.

Two other school districts in the middle of the state — Avon and Franklin Township — had a ballot referendum defeated. In Franklin Township, a $13 million shortfall has forced the district to find alternative funding or cut staff by up to 81 teachers, according to the Indianapolis Star. Avon had a $3.4 million shortfall.

How this is going to affect high school sports is just a guess at this point, but plenty of administrators are worried about what the future holds.

“I don’t think schools understand what is going to happen to them yet,” IHSAA commissioner Bobby Cox said. “It’s just going to take some time to figure out.”

Some schools, such as Center Grove High School in Indianapolis, already have approved a pay-to-play requirement for their student athletes. It costs $170 for each varsity sport — $510 if a student played three sports — and $85 for middle school athletes.

No school in the area has gone that far — yet.

Many, however, do charge a transportation fee.

At Hobart, it costs $30 per student. Other schools, such as Morton, charge each sport a flat fee and they expect them to fundraise collectively for fees. Last year, Dorulla ditched the transportation fee for a student-participation fee that the school used to pay a trainer from St. Anthony’s.

Cox sees the pay-to-play formula as problematic.

“It brings up issues of fairness,” he said. “What do you do if someone wants to play but they can’t afford it?”

The creative solutions for alternative sources of financing that athletic directors are trying to find is all part of their new juggling act in these tough economic times.

Wheeler High School has had to hold off putting in new bleachers at its football field because it doesn’t have the capital funding for it. Randy Stelter, the Wheeler athletic director, said his department in now responsible for resurfacing the gym floor every summer at a cost of $4,000. That money used to come from a general fund.

Most of his time is consumed by fundraising. The school has to raise between $15,000 and $20,000 to operate its sports budget.

“Seems like that is all I do,” he said.

Stelter was lucky to land former Crown Point basketball coach Tom Johnson for the boys basketball job. Wheeler needed a math teacher and Johnson was in the area and he wanted to coach again.

When asked if pay-to-play might be coming to Northwest Indiana, Stelter said: “I hope not.”

At Hobart, athletic director Bob Glover believes the precarious financial situation of education in the state has affected the number of serious inquiries he received about the open football job, which eventually went to in-house candidate Ryan Turley, a teacher in the system.

Many applicants, he said, never got past a phone call to ask about the job.

The potential landmine? If a new guy takes the job and moves across the state, he is low on the teaching totem poll, meaning he very well could go through what Cronkhite went through this year. The salary for the coaching job is fixed and seniority starts anew when a move is made. So there isn’t much of a carrot to dangle in front of a coach if the salary is preordained and job stability is precarious.

“They’d call and say, ‘Yeah, it would be interesting to apply, but I can’t take a chance to move my family out there,’” Glover said. “You can’t crystal ball these things. You don’t know what the state is going to do. Seems like we go back and revisit these same things. It’s nerve-wracking. All you can do is sit and wait and see what the state is going to do.”

Said Stelter: “I don’t know why you’d want to risk moving from a place where you had 10 or 15 years experience for a coaching job that pays $6,000 per year.”

In Gary, city athletic director Earl Smith is proceeding like its business as usual, even though the school corporation sent out letters to 300 teachers saying they could lose their jobs if a $24 million shortfall isn’t made up.

One of their best coaches, West Side football coach Alex Pratt, received the letter and he already has offers in hand for teaching and coaching that he’s considering. He also hasn’t ruled out staying at West Side.

Smith really doesn’t know what is going to happen until the state sets its funding levels.

“I’m just operating like all the coaching positions and assistants will be back next year,” he said.

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