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 choose to join our organization, we handle registration and invest financial resources directly in the teams with minimal overhead costs. We share statements of activities at the end of each season.
We plan to become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
We intend for our teams to represent their school in the same Art David Athletic League that they have competed in for decades, but that is at risk due to the lack of support from the Palo Alto Unified School District. Please visit our Advocacy page to help!
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 is a data scientist and continues to coach at JLS under PAMSACO.
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.
Our idea for PAMSACO originated in 2024 as a better way to finance the JLS cross country and track and field teams for which we had coached.
Despite our sports generating large amounts of revenue for the City of Palo Alto Middle School Athletics program ($50,585 in the most recent year from 151 registrations), we had been receiving minimal support from the city's MSA program. We and other parent volunteers planned our practices and meets independently and received only basic support from the City of Palo Alto MSA program: jerseys that were ordered late, a small amount of equipment, and coverage for a coach who broke her leg, except that the covering city employee left the practices unsupervised. Moreover, we had been unable to convince the City of Palo Alto MSA program to provide small services such as painting markings at the Cubberley track and paying for pizza at an end-of-season party.
This led us to learn that 65% of the overall City of Palo Alto MSA's budget was set aside to compensate city employees who were not providing our sports with substantial support. For our particular sports with high revenue and costs from paid coaches or referees, 6% of our $50,585 in revenue was taken as profit by the city and 95% of the remainder was spent to compensate the city employees.
We created PAMSACO as a way to spend registration fees more efficiently and transparently on services that serve our student athletes instead of unneeded overhead costs at the City of Palo Alto.
We hope to help all PAUSD middle school student athletes in one of three ways: other teams may join, the city may adopt successful practices that we prototype, or PAUSD may use our program as a model for how to manage middle school sports more effectively without outsourcing to the city.