6 minute read
PAY To PLAY
Pay to Play
Oyster River athletes are paying hundreds of dollars to play for their high school teams.
For the pretty lump sum of five hundred dollars, Oyster River High School (ORHS) students have been offered an excellent opportunity: the promise of being bruised, battered, and pummeled into the ground.
ORHS students are charged $500 to play football for the Oyster River-Portsmouth Clipper Cats, but Portsmouth High School (PHS) students play for free. The system is strongly disliked by some of the players and the student body who know this. However, everyone on the team is being charged the same amount; PHS policy dictates that they cover the cost for all their student-athletes to play sports throughout the school year. The divide is ORHS policy: all athletes are entirely self-funded, and for a few sports, the cost is high.
There are three ORHS and Portsmouth (PHS) combined athletic teams: football, girls ice hockey, and Fall Spirit (cheer). While football costs a steep $500, the girl hockey players are each charged a steeper $850, and Spirit athletes pay $75. The ORHS boys' hockey team also pays $850. Right now, there are 14 ORHS girl hockey players in the combined program, 25 ORHS football players, and 6 on Fall Spirit, the combined cheer team.
BY PAYING FOR ONE SPORT, THEY WOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR ALL OF THEM
For the Oyster River boys hockey team, playing comes at a high cost, but everyone is faced with the same one. For some of the athletes on cooperative teams, it feels like an inequality because they are mixed in with student-athletes who do not have to. This means that the ORHS athletes playing girls hockey would experience the same perceived inequality as the ORHS football players and Spirit cheerleaders – all of which are cooperative teams.
Cooperative or not, the cost for ORHS students to play on any sports team depends on the number of athletes in the sport and the cost to run the program. The Portsmouth athletic director, Tom Kozikowski, said, “Ice hockey is more expensive due to the rental of the facility, so hockey players would pay more than someone on the cheerleading team, where the overhead expenses for the cheerleading program will be significantly lower.”
In hockey, a huge cost is ice time. For football, expenses include the costs of equipment, equipment testing, jerseys, etc., but because the practices all happen at PHS on their fields, that is not something included in the costs. But for some of the ORHS football players it’s not just about the number.
“You know, it’s their school so it’s almost like we are joining them,” said Landon Wolusky (25’), a varsity player on the Clipper Cats football team from Oyster River. Unlike hockey, they aren’t on a neutral playing field—they are on the Portsmouth playing field.
According to Eliza Wheeler (‘24), who is a captain on the girls’ hockey team, this isn’t the same way a lot of them view it. “We just feel like one team, and I don’t normally think of us as two schools, because it kind of feels like playing for a club team; everyone can come from literally anywhere and we just learn to play together.”
For any of these sports, however, the price tag can still play a defining role in whether an ORHS student athlete decides to play. Alex Montagano (‘26) played for the freshman Clipper Cats last year but did not play again this year. “The Portsmouth kids get to play for free, but we have to pay and it’s not really fair,” he said.
“I’ve had to pay all four years of high school because ice time is just so expensive,” said Wheeler. The Oyster River boys hockey team and the ORHS/ PHS girl’s cooperative team both have boosters’ programs that fundraise a lot of the money. She added, “We fundraise; our boosters organize it, and that can help lower the cost a little.”
The ORHS boys hockey program is in a similar position. “If we had a student who couldn’t afford to pay, that’s something the boosters would help with,” said Peter Harwood, the ORHS boys’ hockey coach.
In the case that either team cannot afford to pay, or the boosters cannot cover it, the high school would pay f o r the student. “We would never let financial need prevent a student from playing on an athletic team,” Lathrop said, adding, “the school would always take care of whatever that cost is.” This money would come from the athletic department’s annual budget.
This past season, when the problem came up for a few Oyster River students on the Clipper Cats football team, they set up fundraisers at Portsmouth High School that covered the costs. Kosikowski said he heard about these afterwards and that he feels it “was a great display of building a team.”
Both athletic directors agree that if the ORHS athletic department had known about the need prior to the fundraiser, those students would have been taken care of by the school. “I think it was really just a miscommunication,” said Lathrop.
Five years ago, in January of 2018, the Oyster River school board voted to start their first cooperative athletics program with PHS: football. This was followed with the establishment of the ORHS-Portsmouth girls hockey program the next year.
“It was my first year working as the athletic director here [ORHS] and there were some people -- families and students -- who came to me about playing football,” said Andy Lathrop, the ORHS athletic director. According to Lathrop, from there, they presented to the school board, where the idea of starting a cooperative team was proposed and then approved.
This approval for a cooperative team did not impact the procedure for ORHS students: student athletes on a cooperative would be self-funded like all of their other student-athletes.
“By paying for one sport, they would have to pay for all of them,” said Lathrop. In comparison with sports such as volleyball, soccer, track and field, etc., the associated costs are much higher for sports like hockey and football. That is why playing these sports while being self-funded comes with a price tag.
ORHS student-athletes are paying a cost not paid for by the Oyster River School District, that goes directly into paying for the costs associated with their sport. This cost has deterred some student-athletes at ORHS from competing, but they are not costs associated with being on a cooperative team.
The goal of the co-op teams is to give more students an opportunity to compete in their sports. However, that does not mean these opportunities are equal to those of PHS students.
Cam Fournier (‘25) who plays for the Clipper Cats football team, experiences that feeling of inequality firsthand: “We should all pay, or none of us should.”
