They Found a Winning Proposition

The idea of recruiting businesses to shoulder some of the costs of high school athletics in Southern California was born of necessity.

Before 1978, there was no such thing as the “official fast food” of the California Interscholastic Federation. There was no need for it.

Today, the companies producing an “official” shoe, drink, ball, line of swimwear and convenience store all contribute money to the CIF Southern Section.

The concept of corporate sponsorship began as an experiment designed to ease the effects of Proposition 13.

School extracurricular activities--particularly sports--were an immediate victim of the reduction in state education revenue.

Although Prop. 13 had no direct effect on the Southern Section, which receives its funding exclusively from member schools, the domino effect meant the CIF budget eventually stood to suffer along with its some 500 members.

The Southern Section’s funding is based on a formula that charges each school according to its enrollment and number of varsity sports. Today, members pay 23 cents per student and $15 per varsity sport, an average of about $450 a year.

But seven years ago, the fiscal health of the CIF was simultaneously threatened on two fronts.

As the financially strapped schools were forced to cancel sports, CIF revenues would dwindle. At the same time, inflation had caused the Southern Section to consider raising its dues.

But at that juncture, any such plan would have been a matter of wringing blood from turnips. With school boards in an uproar over which programs to amputate, preserving the three R’s was a more vital concern than retaining 3-A, or any other division of sports.

Commissioner Ray Plutko, then assistant to former Commissioner Tom Byrnes, said if the Southern Section had raised its fees even a few hundred dollars, one or two sub-varsity level teams would have been disbanded at many schools in order to pay the bill.

He figured that even such a minimal increase could have spelled the end of a sport for about 50 students per school, or 25,000 athletes in Southern California.

Instead, Byrnes and Plutko decided to find a creative solution to the financial bind.

That explains how Plutko wound up as the lone high school sports administrator at an NCAA seminar in Dallas on the alien subject of “Sports Promotion and Marketing.”

The Southern Section already had had one experience in that field when Dr. Pepper had agreed to pay for the championship trophies, plaques and certificates, worth about $20,000.

“They listened to our plea and thought they would like to get on the bandwagon because our programs helped young people and their promotions were starting a big push among young people,” said Moe Chavez, president of the Southern Section and principal of Downey High School.

That proved to be a beneficial arrangement for everyone concerned, particularly the CIF, and it encouraged the staff to believe the idea could be expanded.

When Plutko became commissioner, he suggested to the executive committee, which consists of representatives of all the school principals, that the Southern Section attempt to use corporate sponsors on a six-month trial basis.

“It was a slow process because at that point we were pioneering something original, not only in California, but in the United States,” Plutko said.

Chavez, a member of the executive committee in 1978, recalled some of the reasons his peers were initially hesitant.

“Everyone in the schools felt industry was going to try to dictate to the CIF, but it was not so,” he said.

Plutko said he avoided that prospect by exercising a great deal of control and caution from the start.

“The executive committee was only concerned that the organization not be party to any commercialism and that any agreements would be on our terms--even if it meant saying no to a corporation,” Plutko said.

“It was a look-and-see process,” he said. “We initially approached it in small doses with a lot of safeguards.”

At the end of the first year, the Southern Section had three new sponsors and about $40,000 of new operating revenue.

Even more reassuring was the fact that no incidents related to sponsors had arisen to tarnish the Southern Section’s integrity.

The executive committee gave the program its hearty endorsement and in 1980 added to the staff a full-time fund-raiser--Larry Zucker, director of sports marketing and promotions.

Because of Plutko and Zucker’s sponsorship efforts, the Southern Section has had to raise its dues only once in the past seven years.

And the idea has caught on at high school athletic organizations elsewhere. The North Coast Section in the Bay Area has a full-time fund-raiser.

Nowadays, when Chavez reflects on the sponsorship program, the thought that comes to mind is “the more the merrier.” But he hastens to add, “Within limits, that is.”