Support PAUSD middle school athletics by spending registration fees efficiently and transparently on services that support our student athletes.
We are an alternative to the City of Palo Alto Middle School Athletics program. For PAUSD middle school sports teams that join our organization, we handle registration and invest financial resources directly into the teams with minimal overhead costs. We share statements of activities at the end of each season to ensure transparency.
We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
As described in more detail below, we began operations in fall 2024, successfully running a cross country team for JLS Middle School. Starting in fall 2025, we expect to become the official organization contracted by the City of Palo Alto to operate the JLS Cross Country and Track and Field teams, with the potential to expand to other teams in the future.
Our goal is to benefit all PAUSD middle school student athletes in one of three ways:
Additional teams may choose to join our program,
The City may adopt successful practices that we prototype, or
PAUSD may use our model to manage middle school sports more effectively without outsourcing.
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. Of the $50,585 that our two teams generated, the City took 6% as profit, and 95% of the remaining funds were spent to compensate city staff.
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.
Starting in May 2024, 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 drafted a Scope of Services in April or May 2025 for a Request for Proposals (RFP).
We hope to apply through that RFP to operate the official JLS Cross Country team starting in fall 2025, follow a similar process to start operating the JLS Track and Field team starting in spring 2026, and perhaps expand to other teams in the future.
Regardless of the City’s RFP timeline, we plan to run our JLS Cross Country program again in fall 2025, building on the success of our 2024 season.
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.