Support PAUSD middle school athletics by spending registration fees efficiently and transparently on services that support our student athletes.
We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that has prototyped how to effectively manage middle school sports with a minimum of administrative overhead, and we are working toward scaling this model across all sports and schools in Palo Alto.
Our organizational model is to handle administrative aspects of middle school sports efficiently while investing the majority of registration fees in coaching and other equipment and services that directly benefit student athletes. This allows us to more effectively recruit and retain coaches, provide a better experience for students, offer full fee waivers to low-income students, and maintain or reduce registration fees.
We have operated a cross country team for JLS since 2024 as a pilot program.
Our advocacy has led the City of Palo Alto to consider transferring management of middle school sports to local nonprofits, and we plan to propose managing the middle school sports program.
The idea for PAMSACO (Palo Alto Middle School Athletics Community Organization) began in 2024 as a better way to support and fund the JLS Cross Country and Track and Field teams.
Since 1991, the Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) has outsourced the operation of middle school sports to the City of Palo Alto. Despite high registration fees (currently $335 per season), program quality has been inconsistent. Some sports have had to turn away student athletes due to coaching shortages; in other cases, coaches have left midseason without notice, or teams have been run entirely by unpaid parent volunteers.
A group of parent volunteer coaches including our founder realized that the JLS Cross Country and Track and Field teams were especially underserved given the revenue they generated. In the 2023–2024 school year alone, the two teams brought in $50,585 from 151 registrations, but the City’s Middle School Athletics (MSA) program provided only minimal support: jerseys that arrived late, a small amount of equipment, and a replacement coach (a city staffer who replaced a parent coach who broke her leg) who left practices unsupervised.
In looking into the program’s finances, we discovered that 65% of the entire City MSA budget was allocated to compensating city employees who were not providing our teams with substantial support and were not coaching or otherwise directly involved in the day-to-day operations of any other teams. On average, $218 of each $335 registration fee is spent on this administrative overhead.
We founded PAMSACO in July 2024 to spend registration fees more efficiently and transparently, reducing unnecessary overhead and increasing investment in coaching and other services and equipment that benefit student athletes.
In fall 2024, we launched our first team, JLS Cross Country.
We faced challenges imposed by the City MSA program: they prohibited our team from participating in five of the six league meets comprising our usual season, while spinning up a separate team with access to these meets, leading a small number of student athletes to join the separate team. Despite these challenges, we enrolled 62 student athletes in our team, more than had enrolled in the sport in 2023.
Our season was a success. We supplemented the one league meet with three USATF youth meets, a meet co-hosted with Run Club Menlo Park, and a 1600m team time trial on the track. We hired five coaches, three of them former collegiate athletes in the sport, enabling us to staff each practice with two to three coaches and provide quality instruction and supervision while the team enjoyed training at nearby parks and through various routes in the neighborhood. We also lowered registration fees from $335 to $200.
We surveyed families on whether to continue the pilot program in 2025, received strongly favorable responses, and successfully continued the pilot program in 2025.
We initially contemplated multiple ways that our pilot program could lead to benefitting teams across sports and middle schools in Palo Alto: additional teams could join our program, the City could adopt successful practices that we prototype, or PAUSD could adopt successful practices and operate sports directly. As described in detail below, our strategy has evolved to focus on working with the City to take over management of all middle school sports in Palo Alto.
Starting in May 2024 and focusing on our pilot program, we first petitioned PAUSD to simply allow our JLS student athletes to represent their school in league competitions. In June, Superintendent Don Austin ended discussions and directed us to petition the City.
In July, we asked the City’s MSA program, led by Director of Community Services Kristen O’Kane, to allow our team to compete on behalf of the school. They declined. As an alternative, we proposed that the City consider allocating substantially more funds to team operations, and they declined to consider such changes.
We launched our team in August 2024 and started to bring our concerns to the City Council in September. In October, the Council voted unanimously to direct the Parks and Recreation Commission to “evaluate outsourcing middle school athletics to local nonprofits.” In December, the Commission formed an ad-hoc committee. Based on its recommendation, the City launched a project to evaluate new operational models involving outside organizations.
The City posted Request for Information in July 2025, and we replied with a response describing how our goals and experience align well with the City's objectives. We expressed interest in a measured approach where we would start by managing cross country and track and field, potentially expanding to more sports in the future.
In April 2026, the Parks and Recreation Commission decided to take the next step of issuing a Request for Proposals, focusing on nonprofits proposing to operate all middle school sports for the three Palo Alto middle schools.
We hope that the City issues their Request for Proposals soon. We are developing plans for how we would operate all sports, and we plan to submit a proposal to do so.
If the City's evaluation is not complete before the fall season and families are interested, we plan to continue our JLS Cross Country pilot program.
Tom Haxton founded PAMSACO in 2024 after serving as the head cross country and track and field coach at JLS in the 2023-2024 school year. He has been coaching the PAMSACO JLS Cross Country team since 2024. He is a data scientist and parent of two boys (JLS class of 2026 and future JLS class of 2030). He has been running and racing since middle school, including competing in college for the University of Chicago and currently competing for the West Valley Track Club.
Ginnie Noh ...
Scott Paterson is a former New York State high school cross-country champion and former NCAA Division I Cross-Country and Track runner for Dartmouth College. Scott founded the non-profit, Poverty2Propserity.org in 2008 which has made over 50,000 zero-percent interest loans to the working poor with a 99% repayment rate since then. In 2018, Coach Scott started a running program for kids in Menlo Park which then became the non-profit and USATF youth running club, Run Club Menlo Park.