When the East Ridge High School volleyball team headed out for last weekend’s Ravenwood tournament, players didn’t have the luxury of piling on a bus together.

The Lady Pioneers instead traveled via caravan, with parent volunteers making the 260-mile round trip at their own expense.

“We’ve been very lucky with great parent support at East Ridge,” coach Catherine Neely said. “We just take them in cars. We had probably eight or 10 going up to Ravenwood.”

For most area teams in sports with smaller rosters or budgets, paying for buses or vans to transport players isn’t an option. Coaches who rely on moms and dads to help their teams get to and from out-of-town events are well aware that those parents now have to absorb the extra expense created by increased fuel prices.

Many are looking for ways to ease the burden for the families.

“Buses have always been too expensive,” Ooltewah soccer coach Rick Adolph said. “With the costs of the bus, the fuel and the driver, it was almost impossible to use buses even before fuel prices went up. Our boosters help make sure everyone has rides. If it’s a game in the area, we’ll let the older kids drive, but if it’s out of the area, we have parents drive.

“So far no one’s complained about the fuel, but when I do my scheduling, I try to do as much locally as we can. It is something you have to think about.”

Besides scheduling closer opponents, some coaches have reduced the number of contests, while others are participating in more tournaments or starting ones of their own. Local events like this weekend’s Choo-Choo volleyball and Chattanooga Christian soccer tournaments let teams play multiple games against high-level competition at one site.

The Choo-Choo is the state’s largest volleyball tournament, with 32 teams participating this year, while the CCS soccer event included 16 teams from across the state. Half of the teams in each event are from outside the area, and the tournaments’ directors said all the participants committed to compete last spring.

Both Neely and Chattanooga Christian’s Cal Sneller said they haven’t heard any complaints from teams traveling to Chattanooga this weekend — including several from West and upper northeast Tennessee — but acknowledged that if fuel costs continue to rise, it could affect those tournaments in the future.

“It impacts so much of your thinking now,” Sneller said. “We have to watch every penny. The economy is tight. We feel it with our families, and we’re starting to feel it with our school.”

Besides last weekend’s Ravenwood tournament and the one it hosted this weekend, East Ridge will compete in two other tournaments this season. Like many coaches, Neely believes participation in tournaments during the regular season is a vital part of preparing for the postseason, making the experience players gain worth the expense of traveling.

“You have to expose your kids to the best competition if you want to get anywhere,” Neely said, “and you can’t always do that at home. You’ve got to travel and see different teams and styles of play. Volleyball is a tournament-oriented sport. They learn so much from going.”

For some teams, however, traveling to face their regular-season opponents creates enough of an expense. The geography of district and region alignments has been a major focus of the current TSSAA reclassification process, but in the meantime, schools such as Arts & Sciences have to compete against teams from as far away as Englewood, Sweetwater and Tellico Plains.

The downtown Chattanooga magnet school requires parents to complete 18 volunteer hours each school year, an obligation some fulfill by driving players to and from those games. The responsibility for filling up fuel tanks is their own.

“It makes you think twice about scheduling any of those teams that you don’t have to play,” CSAS athletic director Mark Dragoo said. “In the spring we’ll do doubleheaders a lot more in baseball and softball. I know our parents are feeling (the burden), but we really appreciate them pitching in.”

John Carter, whose daughter Haven is a sophomore on the East Ridge volleyball team, said no matter how high gas prices rise, he doesn’t expect most parents to cut back on travel, although many are carpooling to share the expense.

“Whenever they travel and I can be there, I am,” Carter said. “You’re always going to have parents who want to go support their kids. When you split the costs between the people that are traveling, it’s definitely a lot easier. We play club ball too, so we’re used to traveling a lot. It’s just part of our life.”

Carter spent Friday night working the popular concession stand inside the East Ridge gymnasium during the Choo-Choo tournament, raising money that will help fund the school’s volleyball program. Profits from concessions, camps, gate receipts and fundraisers have always been an important part of high school sports, and they are even more necessary now that a greater percentage of those teams’ budgets is being spent on fuel.

The Ooltewah soccer team’s efforts to raise money have included car washes, pancake breakfasts and T-shirt sales, but Adolph said the overall worsening of the economy has left most people with less money available to donate.

“There are a lot of parents who can’t keep forking over the money,” he said. “Our fundraising comes and goes, but if we get to the point where we’re bringing in more money, we would like to give out gas money or reimburse the parents who do more of the driving. That’s something to think about, but it’s hard to do. Everyone’s money is tight because of fuel.”

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