Want your boys basketball game on ESPN? It’s going to cost you

January 30th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanR

Fascinating and rather eye-opening story in today’s Atlanta Journal-Consitution on how much it costs high schools to facilitate boys basketball games on ESPN2 and ESPNU. Long story short: factoring in getting the court ready, hosting another team etc. etc. some schools are plopping down damn near $13,000 to get their kids some face time on the WWL. (Sounds bad. But if you get enough people to show up for $10 a pop, you can almost break even.)

Anyways, I suggest reading the whole thing, namely to show how much the culture on this stuff has changed in such a short time (when LeBron was a senior ESPN showed two games; this year 15) and how it’s clear kids playing basketball get an insane amount of coverage.

Here’s the choice passage though:

David Boyd, the boys coach at Milton, was among the first Georgia coaches to court national exposure when he pitted his Berkmar teams, which would win two state titles, against national competition while luring shoe and apparel contracts.

“ESPN should pay,” Boyd said. “They [the network and Paragon] are benefiting. Money should be shared.”

“But ESPN has got the sledge-hammer,” said Dave Hunter, retired athletics director at Brookwood. “Like it or not, they’ve still got the thing everybody wants — exposure … If you could put your program on a national stage and not cost you more than $2,500, I’d do it.”

Norcross is not complaining.

“To pay for two hours of advertising on ESPN2, I don’t know any high school in Georgia that could write a check for that,” Barton said. “The exposure the kids and the school got was top-notch. We’ve had a lot of compliments … on how good they made the school look.”

Yessir, ESPN does hold the sledgehammer; they’re the only game in town if you want to get your kids some exposure. (I learned that from a book.) But they’re also not sharing much of any revenue with the schools they’re exposing. Until high schools figure this all out and it catches up to the college game somewhat, some schools might be paying a hefty price to get their kids on TV. (When they figure out how to make money, they’ll probably start televising middle school ball, I suppose.)

So yes: ESPN giveth, ESPN taketh away. Just another day at the office, folks.