All these coaches using public tracks or school parking lots (bootcamps) should pay the school to use the venue. Why they think they should be able to make money off of their usage without paying for it is odd.
Seems reasonable. Many or most U.S. high schools and colleges close their tracks to the public now. Strollers, scooters, skate boards ruin tracks quickly. If $5 per 90 minutes granted me greater access, seems fair to me. Pools charge money. Ice rinks charge money. When tracks are open to the public, tracks quickly get damaged. It cost money to hire men & women to patch tracks.
The floodlit 8-lane synthetic track (10 lane x 100m) is equipped to cope with competition from junior to elite level. Wilberforce Road track is the training and competitive base for both the University Athletics Club and the...
There is a public HS track within 1 mile of my home. It is locked during the day and its within sight of school buildings, so I'm not keen to hop the fence during daylight. It used to be open at like 5AM for some reason so I was doing my workouts then, but recently they've started closing it then, too.
Oh, and the HS charges the college team (who somehow doesn't have their own track) $500/hr for its use.
Someone explain to me how a public school can charge its own taxpayers for the use of a track? I get that a school has priority use of it (for practices, competitions, etc.) but even at 5AM, when no one else it out there?
‘Public schools’ are anything but ‘public’. A more apt title would be ‘government schools’. They use tax money harvested under threat of violence to fund programs that frequently (and perhaps usually) confuse and corrupt young people. ‘Private schools’ often not much better when it comes to output, but at least they’re funded chiefly by users and perish if they fail to attract new users or volunteer donors.
I agree that if I’m forced to work many hours to pay for high schools and colleges to do whatever they do, the least they can do is let me jog on the track when not interfering with their operations…
My favorite anecdote was from the period around 2018 when the UCLA track would normally be open during the summer, but I went one day to find the whole facility locked down and leased (for big money, no doubt) to Manchester United. This continued for a week or so. Looks like UCLA is more focused on serving foreign big businesses than it is its own taxpayers. Digging further into the numbers, I found that UCLA has a similar enrollment and similar programs (both have expensive things like medical schools) to nearby USC but finds a way to spend something like 30% more per student, while taking in far less user revenue. Government schools are a massive scam.
The Brits are so screwed. I am really sorry. Good thing Rupert Murdoch didn't mess up the US that much.
What does Brexis have to do with track fees? If I was British, I'd be proud of Brexit. A country without borders isn't a country.
Correct. Brexit has nothing to do with track fees. I can only imagine the twisted logic here: athletes who would normally have gone to the continent for track workouts are now having to pack onto local tracks… or rubber track material prices have shot up because they now fall under different tariff regulations.
The reality is that the folks running tracks everywhere used the covid hysteria and checkpoint-mongering to monetize and privatize their assets. Nothing wrong with this in principle, except when those assets are uncongested and taxpayer-funded… though they probably shouldn’t be taxpayer funded because most taxpayers benefit precious little from tracks, and taxpayer-funded tracks will likely cost more than they’re worth while being maintained relatively poorly.
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