The Emporia Recreation Commission will not manage the Paul Terry Classic basketball tournament next year.
Recreation Director Tom McEvoy said Monday he would be resigning as tournament director and that his organization would begin playing a smaller role after the girls’ half of the tournament is played in January. The event was created by Emporia Sports Promotions in 1997 as the KVOE Tip-Off Classic, but since then, the recreation center has taken on most of the logistics.
It’s a good event, McEvoy said, but he and his workers no longer have the time to run it.
“I can’t justify to you the amount of time they spend on it when they’re needed for so many other activities,” he told the recreation commissioners in a Monday meeting.
Any profits from the event go to ESPI. The tournament was renamed last year in honor of Paul Terry, the first black student to play basketball at Emporia High School. As an adult, he worked quietly to promote civil rights in Emporia. Terry died in 2005.
McEvoy said he and his staff would assist with the transition and would help ESPI create a basketball committee to oversee the event.
“It’s an ESPI event,” he said. “My folks will still want to volunteer to help tear tickets and that sort of thing, but the behind-the-scenes work and weeks of advance planning ... it became too much for us to do.”
In other business, recreation commissioners began discussing whether to change the recreation center’s fee waiver policy. Presently, students who qualify for a free school lunch pay no fees, while those who qualify for a reduced lunch pay half.
In tennis and golf, roughly 30 percent of the kids who participate have a full or partial waivers. Both of those are activities where the recreation commission contracts with an outside instructor, paying a basic fee and a percent of the enrollments.
McEvoy suggested giving a 50 percent discount to free-lunch students and a 25 percent discount to reduced lunch students. He also suggested limiting the number of waived activities to six per year.
“Some parents sign their kids up for $600 worth of activities,” he said.
Commissioners also discussed ways to revive the junior baseball and softball program, which has had faltering participation. One possibility raised was to form a league with other recreation centers in the area, with some games played out of town.