Lincoln High School has officially moved up to a 4A school and with that all of Lincoln sports. I am a part of the golf team and there are a lot of things that are very questionable about Lincolns golf program.
The Lincoln golf team has 16 boys and 12 girls, making us just 4 girls off from having a full 2 teams. The entire golf team is being mistreated by SPS in multiple ways including the way the girls team season is set up, the coaches pay, and the overall funds of the team.
When SPS combined the seasons, they moved the girls’ team, into the guys’ season. This caused the girls to have a large off-season before competing in Metros and Districts, making it hard to compete, as we don’t have 2 months of team practice right before Metros like the other players have.
Because we moved to 4A, 6 of our girls automatically make it to districts, which is exciting. However, they are going to play against students that are at a different skill levels and have had more recent training.
SPS decided to cut Lincoln’s assistant coach, making one coach oversee 25-30 kids per season. On top of that, they pay the coaches for hours worked. They estimate that coaches work 140 hours, while other districts estimate 200-250 hours worked. This causes SPS golf coaches to make less than all other sport coaches, and all other district golf coaches.
“They decided to take away our assistant coaches unless we could have over 40 kids on the team. You cannot have a golf team with over 40 kids, you just can’t,” says Ms. O’Hearn, the former golf coach.
All golf coaches have a max of 16 kids that they allow to join because otherwise the team is too large to be functional and stable.
The boys’ and girls’ golf teams each get $1,000 for overall funds, which is a substantial improvement on last year’s funds of $600 for both teams combined. However, it is still not enough to make it through the entire year.
Coach Sauvage adds, “We are not super far into the season, and we’ve already used almost all of our funds on range balls. I also think if we didn’t have great parents to help fundraise, that we would not be able to have a full season of practice.”
He’s referring to the fact that parents are encouraged to donate to the team and participate in fundraisers and events to help raise more money because we are already low on funds even though we only started the season a couple of weeks ago.
Due to lack of funding for the golf team, SPS is forcing us to rely on parents for funding. We don’t have an assistant coach on payroll and they underpay the only golf coach we have.
This negligence on SPS’s part is blocking the girls on the team from a fair chance in Metros and Districts.
Being on the golf team, I believe that SPS needs to change the way they treat Lincoln golf. They need to be better with how they treat the female team and the coaches. They also need to change funding that can accomodate everyone on the team, not just what SPS wants.