Where does the money go????. . . . . There are many factors involved. One is that we have our own facility (MTAA Sports Complex). Maintaining that facility is a large, year- round expense. Some of the buildings and items in them are over 50 years old. There are always repairs to be made. This facility not only benefits baseball & softball, but all sports, as we have a large storage building there in which we can safely house all of our equipment for all sports. Contact football is a very expensive sport. While we do charge more for contact football than any other sport, the increase still does not cover all the true costs. Just to have the helmets and pads sanitized and re-certified for safety costs over $3,000. A couple of years ago, there were many pads that were beyond reconditioning and needed to be replaced. The cost for replacing them was over $7,500. Add on the referee & umpire fees for football, baseball, softball, boys & girls basketball & wrestling and you are looking at many more thousands of dollars per year. Referee fees for football alone costs us $945 in ONE DAY if all teams play at home. The teams typically play 4 home games per season. For Boys Basketball, referee fees can be upwards of $300 per day when all teams play. Since it’s an in-house sport, they each play approximately 8-10 games per season.
Additionally, we have a loan to pay for equipment that is used to maintain the fields for our baseball and some of our softball teams. We also would like to try to build a nest egg because we know the lights at the ball field are old and will need to be replaced at some point soon which is a tremendous expense. We have formed a committee recently to do a closer analysis of each sport to see if we can lower fees at some places while raising them in other places but that is a work in progress at this point.
For many years, MTAA ran a bingo at the hall attached to Jimbo’s. The bingo gave us revenue of over $30,000 per year. Once the no-smoking laws went into effect a number of years ago, the bingo business dropped off. The bingo laws also changed and required that the bingo was run by volunteers from our organization and we were unable to provide the number of volunteers needed. Since then, we have had to turn to various fundraising efforts to make up for that loss. MTAA turned to the raffle tickets as we are doing now for sports, with a monetary prize drawing during each season. We heard complaints about the mandatory fundraising tickets, so we went to having voluntary fundraisers. We did Joe Corbi, Yankee Candle, Reppert’s, you name it. But, since it was voluntary, less and less families would sell items. Since there was a lack of support of any voluntary fundraising efforts, we are forced to turn back to the mandatory raffle tickets as a fundraiser. The other option the board talked about was raising the sport fees even higher to make up this loss, but we did not want to do that to the parents. So, the raffle tickets seemed like the best option to give us some needed funds while giving the parents something that they can resell to friends, family & co-workers in order to get their $25 back, so their fee actually did not increase at all.
We have also allowed the individual sports to raise money to help offset expenses strictly for that sport. As an example baseball has done their candy fundraiser the last two years giving prizes to the high sellers and still raising funds that assisted in the purchase of an infield machine this year to help maintain the infields of the fields we use.
If you have any questions about the financial issues of the organization we welcome you to attend any meeting and ask specific questions.
