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BY MATT DIFILIPPO
Staff Writer 10/12/2008

Staff Writer

This January, the Winslow and Gardiner high school wrestling teams each had to travel to a meet.

This happens all the time, but this meet was in Caribou, a 228-mile drive from Winslow High School, according to Google Maps. So the athletic directors at Gardiner and Winslow decided to go to an old solution: Carpooling.

"We went to Caribou on a Saturday," Winslow athletic director Sean Keenan said. "Now, that's not cost-efficient, and everybody recognizes that. Gardiner and Winslow went to Caribou, and we shared a bus. It gave kids a chance to compete where they needed to compete, and it cut the cost of it in half."

With gas prices rising every year, schools around the state are exploring ways to save money on transporting their athletic teams. But they also face a difficult question: How do you cut costs without cutting opportunities for student-athletes?

"For this current fiscal year, we had to make some fairly significant reductions in my budget," Skowhegan athletic director Terry Michaud said. "Approximately 3 percent was taken out of my proposed budget, most of that pertaining to increased travel costs. While we still want to provide opportunities for kids, we have to be fiscally responsible about how we do that."

Some schools have to get especially creative. Forest Hills is the most isolated of any school in the state -- the closest high school is about a one-hour drive -- so athletic director Anthony Amero had to find a way to save the school's golf team.

Forest Hills plays in a golf league with three other teams -- Buckfield, Greenvile and Rangeley. Rather than each school hosting a match, the four schools decided to hold all three regular season matches as well as their state qualifier at Lakewood Golf Course in Madison.

"Knock on wood, it seems like that will keep us afloat, at least for this year," Amero said.

At Skowhegan, Michaud said the school's budget for sports travel is approximately $185,000 per school year.

"Here for Skowhegan, we've reduced our mileage by many, many hundreds of miles a year by looking at scheduling and things like that," Michaud said. "That's a significant amount of money when you add it all up. It's huge."

One thing that helped Skowhegan cut costs was when ice hockey schools in Eastern Maine Class A asked the Maine Principals' Association to reduce the schedule. While ice hockey teams were playing 20 games per season, other sports were playing 18 at most.

"Skowhegan's going to play a 16-game schedule this year," Michaud said. "That's a four-game reduction for us, and one of the trips that we're no longer going to take is to Sanford. The trip to Sanford was approximately $2,000 in bus costs.

"Another game that we're not going to play is Gray-New Gloucester. They play their home games at Hebron Academy. That was $1,500 right there that we saved."

Basketball schedules will also have a different look this winter. The Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference Class A is exploring a plan for long trips that will cut out the freshman-junior, varsity-varsity tripleheaders.

Instead, for example, the Cony freshman teams might play surrounding schools like Erskine, Gardiner and Winthrop, rather than schools in their own conference.

"When we go to Oxford Hills (in South Paris), we're going to send varsity teams only, and we're going to send both boys and girls varsity teams on one bus," Michaud said.

The Mountain Valley Conference is making a similar change. Mt. Abram, for instance, plays four schools -- Boothbay, Georges Valley, Lisbon and Wiscasset -- that are at least two hours away by bus. Those games were JV-varsity doubleheaders in the past, but will now be boy-girl (or girl-boy) varsity doubleheaders.

"We eliminated four JV games and we put our varsity on those long trips," Mt. Abram athletic director Jeff Pillsbury said. "So we're basically going (on those long trips) once every two years instead of once a year."

This will mean 14 games for the Mt. Abram JV teams, instead of the usual 18, but Pillsbury said the potential is there to make up those games and save on travel at the same time.

"Schools have the option of picking up a few more games, if we choose, but we'd do that with our neighbors," he said.

A lot of these changes will definitely save money, but they will also change tradition. But as the expenses keep increasing, it's likely you'll see more ideas to cut costs, so schools won't have to cut programs.

"We're trying to find ways, we're trying to think outside the box, to stretch dollars as much we can," Keenan said, "with travel, and with everything. You're seeing it with equipment, you're seeing it right on down the line, because there are some things you can't control the cost of."

Matt DiFilippo -- 861-9243

mdifilippo@centralmaine.com

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