After reading the editorial entitled “Betrayed by the bond” I wanted to clear up some of the Community Insight Board’s claims. My first question is who is the “Insight Board”and have they ever set foot on the SBHS campus?
You kind of manipulate your dollar figures to make it sound like 12.1 million dollars of bond money is going towards the athletic facilities when the reality is none of the bond money is being spent on these projects. I was athletic director in 2003 and can tell you that many of us had already been working for years to get the weight room/wrestling room built. If your board had ever set foot on the campus and seen the current weight-training facility I am sure that you would happily direct the board to spend bond money to build a new one. But because, despite what you believe, the voters of Hollister and San Benito County generally do not pass bonds to pay for athletic facilities, all of the weight-training students, teachers, athletes and athletic coaches who use the “facility”, and I say that loosely, continue to accomplish great things with a horrible room.
As bad as the weight room is, the wrestling room is even worse. The roof leaks like a sieve when it rains, ringworm has at times been a problem, space is at a premium, and the safety of the athletes and students who use the room is highly at risk.
You always mention athletics, but let’s remember for a moment that the far greater use of both facilities is the physical education department. Approximately 500 physical education students who are not athletes use the weight room, and another 300 athletes. The largest floor space in the weight room is the blacktop outside the room where the floor exercises are performed. Try doing this on a 27-degree morning, or a 100-plus degree afternoon, or during a rain storm. We have had to abandon combatives and self-defense in P.E.
It is also not a coincidence that the Baler wrestling team hasn’t won a CCS title in recent years. Gilroy has a huge amount of space to offer their wrestlers while Hollister continues to have to cram dozens of kids into a space smaller than a regulation wrestling mat. Let’s address the next fallacy in the article, your mention that the bond passed by a narrow margin. To use a sports analogy the Balers lost in overtime to Palma a couple of weeks ago, and the referees did not give them another chance just because the score was close. Let’s talk tennis courts. Even up to the beginning of the construction last spring the physical ed classes, the sports teams and members of the community used the tennis courts. If you managed not to lose your life in the cracks out there you most certainly were in danger of spraining an ankle. The tennis teams have had to play their matches at Ridgemark for a while now which costs the athletic program and the district money. By building the tennis courts at the same time as the parking lot money is saved on the moving of excess dirt from one area to another. All of the infrastructure like lights, water, etc., can be done at once and will certainly be better and longer lasting than if it were added at a later date. The general public can use the tennis courts when completed.
I won’t even broach the issue of the pool despite the fact that it is probably the single greatest need that there is in the physical education and athletic program, yet, and your letter conveniently leaves this part out, is at the bottom, dead last on the priority list. The physical education program is forced to exist without aquatics, combatives, a sub-standard weight training program and no tennis. This is basically like telling the algebra teachers that they can’t teach graphing, solving equations or if they do with one piece of graph paper for each student for the whole year.
But despite all of the wrongs that are mentioned in this article the final quote, “The high school culture insists on appeasing a reckless, selfish crowd that continues to put sports dreams ahead of academic ambitions,” is the most offensive. San Benito High School students get admitted to some of the finest universities and colleges in the United States. They do well when they are there, and in many cases former Balers often comment that some of their high school courses were tougher than the ones they took in college. But, athletes actually have the higher GPA by about a .83 average per student. The 2014 valedictorian was a two-sport athlete at SBHS. The past several outstanding scholar athletes have had above 4.0 GPSs. Here are the results for this fall Cheerleading 3.01, boys X-country 2.8, girls CC 3.3, Football 2.7, Field Hockey 3.4, Golf 3.6, Tennis 3.3, Volleyball 3.4, girls Water Polo 3.4, and Boys Water Polo 3.1. The freshman football team alone was a 2.77 with 71 boys (10%) of the entire freshmen class. All of these are well above the minimum 2.0 required to be academically eligible. Of the top ten from last year most had been or were currently involved in athletics.
Maybe we should be asking the question, “Why does the insight board insist on appeasing a reckless, selfish crowd that continues to believe that academics and athletics do not go hand in hand.”
Randy Logue is a P.E. teacher at San Benito High School.
