When the going gets tough…The Tough Go Shopping!
For Kraft Shop and Score products at Times, that is. In a year when public school sports budgets have been slashed by up to 60 percent, parents and fans can support their teams with this program that begins Aug. 26. With public school athletics budgets slashed, Kraft’s Shop and Score is more important than ever. It starts at Times on Wednesday. Before there was the SOS there was the SAS.
By .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
E-mail this story | Print this page | Archive | RSS |
Del.icio.us
|
With public school athletics budgets slashed, Kraft’s Shop and Score is more important than ever. It starts at Times on Wednesday
Before there was the SOS there was the SAS. While those acronyms may not mean much to those not associated with high school athletics, those with kids involved in sports know them by heart.
SOS (Save Our Sports) was started this year by Hawaii High School Athletic Association director Keith Amemiya in answer to a 36 percent budget cut for public high school athletics. That amounted to a $1.2 million loss for student athletics in a state that prides itself on having the most high school championship sports in the country.
The public outpouring of support has been stirring as donations have come from as disparate donors as the Clarence T.C. Ching Foundation and World Series hero Shane Victorino. But as McKinley High athletic director Neal Takamori is quick to point out, this is not just a 2009 problem.
“This isn’t just a problem this year,” says Takamori, who has been with McKinley for the past 40 years. “This year we got the biggest cut, but over the years we keep losing positions. We are asking a lot of our coaches.”
One need look no further back than last year when a Board of Education meeting had to be called at the 11th hour and testimonies were made by such luminaries as Mayor Mufi Hannemann and UH football coach Greg McMackin to stave off the elimination of all the junior varsity programs in the state.
Answering the bell for the last nine years is the latter of those two acronyms: the Kraft Shop and Score program. SAS provides $100,000 to public schools to buy athletic uniforms and equipment, and divides it up among the schools through a fun little competition.
“Shop and Score really helps. I don’t know how we would do it without them,” says Takamori, who has served as the Tigers’ AD since 1990. “We rotate what teams can have uniforms - this year its softball and volleyball - and Shop and Score allows us to get those uniforms.”
Beginning Aug. 26, in every Times Super Market there are a couple hundred items from companies such as Kraft, Pepsi and Kimberly Clarke marked on the shelves as Shop and Score items. Each one of these items, regardless of price, scores your high school one point in the Shop and Score program.
All you has to do is let the cashier at the register know which school you want your credits to aid. In the past your Royal card would do that automatically, but this year (with the cards being phased out) you need to alert the cashier.
Over the next six weeks all participating high schools will be accumulating points to try to earn their percentage of the $100,000 prize. Athletic directors and principals of each school will receive weekly updates to let them know how they are faring so they can notify parents if more needs to be done.
While each participating school will receive a minimum of $500, the top five schools will be recognized at Aloha Stadium during halftime of the HHSAA state football championship game, at which time the top school will be announced.
Last year’s winner was Mililani High, where the athletic program has just been decimated by the new budget cuts. The Trojans’ budget was slashed by 60 percent, causing the elimination of stipends for 30 coaching positions.
“Our coaches are really good, they are not in it for the money,” says Mililani AD Glenn Nitta, who has been with the school for 37 years. “The ones that were cut, a lot of them will be helping out in the same capacity, just without a stipend.”
While Shop and Score cannot help with the coaches, Mililani also lost $12,000 in equipment money from the state, down to $8,000 from their usual $20,000, which is exactly the niche that SAS fills.
“Reconditioning helmets and shoulder pads for football comes out to $8,000 all by itself, so we’ve got to try to make up that deficit,” says Nitta.
Some may question the expenditures on sports when everything is so tight, but to Nitta they are crucial to the success of the next generation.
“It keeps them off the streets, and academically it motivates them to do well in school because they have to maintain a 2.0 and no Fs to play,” says Nitta, who has served as AD for the past nine years. “Just to participate on a team gives them that sense of belonging and bond together.
“If not, they have all this free time and who knows what they might be getting into. That’s why our league wanted to maintain and not cut sports, because when you start cutting sports you start eliminating teams for the kids to participate in. Our goal is to maintain sports, cut coaches and just keep doing what we have been doing with less.”
The runner-up last year was Waianae High, whose AD, Glenn Tokunaga, echoes Nitta’s sentiments.
“For a lot of our student-athletes it’s a big incentive for them to do well in the classroom, it allows us to stress the academic side of the classroom,” says Tokunaga, who coached baseball at Waianae from 1985 until he took over as AD in 2002.
“The teachers say they can really see a difference in our kids during the season. It helps them maintain their grade point average, attendance and behavior in school. Our side of the Island, there are a lot of things they can get in trouble doing, but if they are at practice and at games then they’re doing something constructive, healthy and preparing for the future.”
Last year was the first year Waianae had appeared in the top five in the state after languishing near the bottom, predominately because the nearest Times to them is in Waipahu. But last year American Savings Bank got on board, offering an additional 100 Shop and Score points if you opened a new ASB free checking account.
“Last year was the first year we really did well. We don’t have a Times located in our area, but they added American Savings Bank and that really pushed us over the top,” says Tokunaga, who has cut his preseason road games from six to one this year to help cut costs.
“We were averaging about $1,000 a year, and last year we got over $10,000. This year we are sending out bulletins to our parents to let them know that this is one of the ways they can help us offset budget cuts over the next few years.”
Motivating parents to get out and help is important, especially when it doesn’t take any money out of their budget that they wouldn’t already be spending. Yet while the ADs are encouraging boosters to get out there, they don’t want to be overaggressive, as Takamori points out, because the more they get, the less the other schools will receive.
And perhaps that is the lesson of high school athletics and programs such as Shop and Score: Sharing and working together is what it takes to make our community better. Don’t just think of yourself, but the team as a whole, and that is the lesson that would be lost without sports to help us practice on the field the way we want to live off it.
“Sports is an educational classroom outside of the classroom and it’s really character education in a lab,” says Takamori. “Teaching values, team-work, dedication and commitment while working through crisis.
“Athletics is a very positive experience that we want to have with this generation. With the e-mails and everything, a lot of times personal relationships get lost. In athletics it allows you to work with people and that is always a good thing.”
Page 1 of 1 pages for this story
E-mail this story | Print this page | Comments (0) | Archive | RSS
Most Recent Comment(s):
