Jack Kartsonis is a Cronkite School of Journalism student assigned to cover Mesa High School for AZPreps365.com

The Mesa High School football team has seen significant funding improvements over the past couple of years, and this is largely due to a newly established booster club.

Four years ago, Mesa effectively had no boosters. A couple of parents involved themselves in the funding process, but the booster club was, more or less, a loosely defined coalition. As a result, little to no money was coming into the program.

But everything changed with the involvement of one parent — Julie Reynolds.

Reynolds, a parent of a Mesa player at the time, saw the deficiencies in the Jackrabbits’ funding and decided to make a change.

“Four years ago, there wasn't really a booster program, so there was no money coming in,” Chelsey Elicio, current president of the Mesa booster club, said. “Three years ago we had Julie Reynolds step up and start building it.”

Those early contributions from Reynolds and now Elicio have led to big payoffs for the Jackrabbits. With more funding comes more opportunities to bring the program to new heights.

This improvement has been especially important for Mesa, which gets almost no direct funding from its athletic department. Instead, the program gets its money from three main sources — individual donations, sponsorships, and gear sales. All of these are heavily tied into efforts from boosters.

“It's a challenge,” Elicio said of the funding process. “We rely heavily on donations.”

Luckily for Mesa, more business have stepped up in terms of both sponsorships and donations.

“Between last year and this year, we have seen more businesses step up to help donate,” Elicio said. “We’ve been able to help the kids more as a booster and do more for them.”

Among the Jackrabbits’ biggest sponsors are The Mahoney Group, Liberty Concrete, Johnson Law, and State 48 Rehabilitation. Most of these businesses, such as Liberty Concrete, are run by past alumni.

“A lot of our alumni donate,” Elicio said. “They're a huge sponsor and benefit to our program.”

Mesa has also seen more individual donations over the past few years. As the Jackrabbits have seen more fan attendance and winning in the past couple of years, the resource of a booster club has allowed for the increase in individual donations.

Unsurprisingly, more fan attendance leads to more funding.

“Financially, increased [fan] support has contributed to ticket sales and it leads to more funding for facilities, equipment, and other program needs,” assistant athletic director Kilea Thomas said previously in an interview with AZPreps365.

Also, as Mesa has won more games in the past three seasons, fans have become more inclined to donate.

“The better we do, we will definitely see more sponsors come in,” Elicio said.

Gear sales have also been a significant financial source for the boosters.

“We sell different apparel, Mesa High football apparel, at every home football game, and then we share our concession stand income with the marching band,” Elicio said.

Increased funding because of Mesa’s booster club revival has led to overwhelmingly positive effects. Just two weekends ago, the football team was fed pregame by IHOP as the result of a funding effort. That would’ve been unthinkable a few years ago.

And due to the increased funding from last year, Mesa football was able to buy and use iPads on the sideline this season, which helps the team with play-calling and film review during games.

But while iPads and IHOP are nice improvements for the Mesa football program, the Jackrabbits have their sights set on greater heights.

As a 6A team in Arizona high school football, the program seeks to compete with some of the state’s powerhouse football programs, such as Basha, Chandler, and Mountain View high schools. Head coach Chad DeGrenier is already proud of his team’s improvement in the 6A division.

“We have a lot of young guys, so our guys are getting used to how 6A football is, and the grind and all that stuff,” DeGrenier said. “I'm proud of how they responded to the mental grind and obviously the physical grind of everyday this season.”

The biggest factor standing in Mesa’s way is the economic situation of the school. Elicio described Mesa as an “economically disadvantaged” school.

“A lot of our football players are more economically disadvantaged,” Elicio said. “So it's a lot harder for us to afford some of the things, as compared to the football program at Mountain View or Red Mountain.”

For example, Mesa can’t have the world-class facilities that other schools have, nor can it travel to California to play a football game every season. These are the realities of the school’s financial situation.

“We can't provide the same stuff that the other teams can provide, and that's just kind of a fact of life, until we keep building,” Elicio said. “We just don't have the money that they have.”

However, Elicio sees a day when the state of Mesa football funding can compete with that of the other Arizona powerhouse programs, especially with the help of its new and thriving booster club.

“The more money you get, the easier it is to compete with those schools and be ranked higher,” Elicio said. “I definitely think we can get there. It's still a challenge because of our demographics, but that's the ultimate goal, to get to where we can compete more with those programs.”