This morning’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch has an article on the Southlake (Tx) Carroll Dragons football program. Southlake, a suburb of Fort Worth, is a wealthy enclave whose residents have a high willingness to pay for the local high school football program. What the author, Tim O’Neill, describes could as well describe many major college programs and professional programs. A couple of excerpts:
The domination on the field of play:
Call it Texas football pageantry on afterburner, fired by championships. Since 1988, the school has won eight state football crowns, including three of the last four at the big-school level. Over the past five years, the Dragons are 72-2.
There is the use of two part tariffs:
The concrete grandstand includes 1,621 reserved seats for season-ticket holders, who buy $90 three-year seat licenses to ward off the long waiting list.
There are the first-rate facilities:
Having great facilities certainly helps. This suburb of airline pilots, business executives and Dallas Cowboy football players living in $500,000-plus homes provides the Dragons with three outdoor practice fields and an indoor center that covers a 60-yard-long turf field.
There is revenue sharing:
The Carroll Independent School District is among the Texas districts that pay into a “Robin Hood” fund for less-fortunate schools. This year it will send $11 million.
After having studied various facets of sports economics for the past 13 years or so, it still interests me how similar the motivations are for for-profit and not-for-profit sports programs. Of course being not-for-profit doesn’t really mean that you can’t have profits as your objective. All having this status does is restrict how profits can be distributed.
