For approximately seven hours a day Harrisonburg High School students are sitting in a classroom, but after school students enjoy various athletic events which include: cross country meets, golf matches and “Friday Night Lights”. HHS Athletic Director Darrell Wilson manages the funds for each team.

“[The funds manage] everything from replacing basketballs to volleyballs. We have to buy baseballs and softballs every year to use for all the games,” Wilson said. “We buy about 20 dozen of each for game balls because they just wear out, and last year’s game balls become practice balls.”

Everything has a cost, and athletics can be expensive. Wilson is the reason why students have the opportunity for “Friday Night Lights”.

“We have a budget that is part of the overall high school budget, which is part of the overall Harrisonburg City Public Schools budget… There is a couple of different sources; when we have games, we bring in money from those, which we have to use to pay officials, staff and all those kind of things,” Wilson said.

The other incomes come from outside of HHS events.

“We get money from the school board, we get two budget lines from downtown. One is ‘athletic’ which is programs, the other is called ‘stadium’, which we use to do the outside maintenance, grounds and upkeep. The athletics one is $181,000, and the stadium is $36,000,” Wilson said.

When it comes to splitting the money between all the teams, it is done so depending on what is needed.

“We don’t necessarily divide money by teams,” Wilson said. “We look at what our needs are for all of our teams, [such as] purchase needs for equipment, like football helmet refinishing every year.”

There are a total of 15 sports at HHS. In addition, some of the sports have girls and boys teams, or JV and varsity teams. Each team needs money to do the things that they do. We have a combined total budget of $217,000 for HHS athletics, but after money is taken out for maintenance, transportation, etc., we have a total of $127,000.