OTTUMWA — Inflate your tires properly. Make sure your motor oil is clean. Turn off your air conditioning. These are all good tips to improve your gas mileage and save money on transportation.

Load a bunch of local kids onto a couple of buses to travel 400 miles on a Friday night?

Not so much.

On Tuesday, the Iowa High School Athletic Association released its new district football assignments for the 2012 season. Area teams learned who they get to play next season.

And area school budget officials learned how much they’re going to have to dole out for travel costs.

Well, they have a general idea, anyway. Gasoline prices are always changing.

In the spring and summer of 2008, gas prices in Iowa hit an all-time high of $4 per gallon. It got close to that again last spring.

So far in the month of January 2012, the price has stayed between $3 and $3.25 per gallon, but doom-and-gloom experts predict the price will go up again as the weather warms, and some have claimed that we’ll see $4 or even $5 per gallon by the end of next summer.

How all of that impacts the cost to play football remains to be seen. But one can take a guess.

For instance, Ottumwa football now has Mason City on its division schedule. The round trip distance to Mason City and back is about 400 miles. 400 miles to play one football game?

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the average school bus gets about 7.4 miles to the gallon. Of course, that is an average across many sizes and styles of buses, and reflects the stop-and-go operation of these buses.

So let’s be optimistic and round up. Let’s say a school bus gets eight miles to the gallon.

So on a trip to Mason City and back, one bus is going to use about 50 gallons of gas. At $4 per gallon, that’s about $200 per bus just for gas.

Some smaller schools in the area might be passing the hat for gas money as well. Davis County, for instance, has three teams in its football district that are over 200 miles away round trip. A round trip from Bloomfield to I-35 or to Bondurant-Farrar logs in at about 220 miles. A trip to play football at Collins-Maxwell-Baxter and return home comes up to about 240 miles. That’s 30 gallons of gas per bus. That’s $120 per bus, just for gas.

In recent years, Ottumwa has traveled to football games as far away as Sioux City — about 570 miles, or 10 hours round trip.

In tough economic times, is a high school football game worth it? As gas prices continue to rise, will long-distance athletic trips begin to bankrupt local school districts? How are cash-impaired schools — particularly smaller schools — going to pay for this?

Around the nation, schools strapped for cash rely heavily on “participation fees” to pay for coaches, uniforms, materials, and buses. This is sometimes called “pay to play.” This is not allowed in Iowa, where most public schools require participants in extracurricular activities to use the school’s transportation to and from away contests. School districts are not allowed to charge a fee to the student for the cost of transportation.

In Minneapolis, high school students pay $60 to participate in sports, but for football that cost is raised to $70, and for hockey it’s $90. How the schools handle making sports accessible for every student varies from school to school.

In Napa Valley, California, high school athletes will fork out $125 per year in transportation costs for one sport, $100 more for two, plus another $75 for each additional team sport.

Of course, a bad economy drives up the numbers of students who simply can’t afford costs for these activities. So poorer kids just don’t play sports, or participate in other activities.

We don’t want that here. At a public school in Iowa, everyone — rich or poor — should get an equal chance to make the football team, or volleyball team, or cheerleading squad, or debate team, or drama club, or whatever other extracurricular activity is available.

So a solution is not that simple, especially when there are other things to consider as well, beyond the financial.

Ottumwa to Mason City is seven hours of travel time, there and back. Assuming the game gets over at a reasonable time and the buses get loaded up by 10 p.m., that gets the young people home sometime between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m.

Of course, there are worse things kids can be doing on a Friday night. Coming home from a football game that late is not necessarily a bad thing when compared to the trouble a teenager can get into after midnight on a weekend.

But is it a good thing in any event to require young student athletes to get home at two in the morning? If these trips thin a school district’s budget to the point that it has to trim or even eliminate other athletic and academic programs, is it worth it?

As gas prices soar and the economy struggles, school districts, the Iowa High School Athletic Association and the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union all need to give that more consideration as they schedule games, contests and events.

And they need to make sure their tires are properly inflated.



Any views expressed in this column are not necessarily the views of the Ottumwa Courier.

Sports editor James Grob can be contacted at sports@ottumwacourier.com.