Staff file photo / Brian Yauger Mathews sophomore Cole Freudenrich (7) jostles with Pymatuning Valley junior Garret Gray for possession of the ball during last season’s game in Vienna.

Three sports and extracurricular activities are on the chopping block at Mathews High School due to cuts in property tax funding.

Due to a $50,000 budget shortfall for athletics, the school is proposing cutting soccer, indoor track and esports, while also issuing pay freezes for two years on all coaches.

“I want what’s best for the kids, I really do, and I hope you believe me when I say that. The last thing I want to do is cut a program. I don’t want to do that,” Mathews athletic director Michael Palumbo said Wednesday during a Q&A forum with parents and students about the proposed cuts.

“These were tough decisions. It wasn’t an easy decision. It all came down to three primary things, and we had a board work session last week and we had some great discussions with our board members, our treasurer and both principals about savings the district’s going to have to face, and athletics is one of those things that we have to look at in order to make savings the state’s handing down and we gotta make some changes.”

The proposal will be voted on during the district’s next school board meeting on Wednesday. The forum was an opportunity for parents, teachers and students in the district to ask questions or voice concerns regarding the proposal before it goes to a vote.

Mathews principal George Garrett said the decision was based on enrollment, gender equity with regard to Title IX and financial constraints.

In addition to those three sports and activities being cut, all remaining sports are also facing partial funding cuts.

“Either way you look at it, we have to make proactive decisions, because when it comes to general payroll for next year, we have to make sure we’re in a place that we can exist as a district,” Garrett said.

Soccer is a fall sport, while indoor track is a winter sport and esports is an extracurricular. Indoor track and esports are not overseen by the Ohio High School Athletic Association, the nonprofit organization that oversees and governs interscholastic athletics in the state.

Other sports that Mathews currently offers in the fall include football, volleyball, cross country, golf, marching band and cheerleading. Outside of indoor track, the only other winter sports are boys and girls basketball.

“We offer the most programming of any school our size in this area,” Garrett said. “Most schools offer football or soccer. One of the teams in our conference only offers cross country, and that’s it in the fall for boys because numbers are on a decline. So we’re very blessed that we have the activity and involvement that we do from our kids. This is not something we want to do. We don’t want to have these discussions, we don’t want to have these choices, but we do have to act within a budget and be fiscally responsible for the realities of what we have.”

Garrett said esports, which he advises, would likely continue as an after-school club that meets once a week, but would not attend any competitions or events. Palumbo indicated the possibility of indoor track continuing as a club sport, as well.

Multiple parents also brought up the possibility of fundraising in order to save the soccer program, but that discussion was tabled for the school board meeting.