Students begin to trickle into Mitchell Park on their bikes and on foot on a Thursday afternoon at around 3:30 p.m. On the field between Jane Lanthrop Stanford Middle School and the Mitchell Park playground, cross country coach Tom Haxton has his athletes start their warm-up drills. While talking with their friends, the kids participate in team stretches before running a warm-up lap around the park.
These kids are on the front lines of a battle over middle school sports, where Haxton has challenged the status quo of the long-established city organized middle school sports program. Haxton, the parent of a JLS student, founded the Palo Alto Middle School Athletics Community Organization (PAMSACO) in 2024 subsequent to having a negative experience with the already existing middle school athletics program.
After a year of coaching cross country and track at JLS, both sports run by the city’s Palo Alto Middle School Athletics Program (MSA), Haxton started questioning and criticizing MSA’s way of spending money on youth sports.
“Each family pays the $335 for the kids to participate,” Haxton said. “[I] didn’t know where that money was going.”
After getting information on the city’s budget, Haxton was able to find out where the registration fee money was going.
“They’re spending 65% of the registration fees to compensate city employees, the same city employees that weren’t supporting [MSA] very much,” Haxton said.
Haxton said that he thought that there was no solution to the problem, until he realized that he could start his own program.
“Four [parent volunteers] had a conversation and realized maybe there’s another route where we could keep doing the day to day stuff we’re doing, and then also take on the additional responsibility of collecting registration fees, and then we could reinvest it back into the program.”
This is when Haxton started PAMSACO. The coaching staff currently consists of Haxton, two other Palo Alto parents and two recent college graduates that both ran cross country and track in college. The city’s athletics program was offering $20 to $25 an hour, however Haxton said he believes this is not sufficient.
“It’s really not enough to incentivize someone to coach small batches who wouldn’t be doing it otherwise,” Haxton said. “We’re able to offer $50 an hour.”
Haxton said that he sees his program improving the district’s middle school athletics in one of three ways.
“Other teams could join ours, or the city could look at our program and copy some of our successful practices that we prototype, or the school district could see that and use this contrast as a motivation for stepping in and taking more active role and developing a better program themselves,” Haxton said.
Kristen O’Kane, director of community services for the City of Palo Alto, said that Haxton’s scope is very narrow, as he’s only looking at cross country and track for JLS, while MSA is all PAUSD middle schools and a variety of sports.
“Mr. Haxton was involved in the program for one year,” O’Kane said. “It was an unusual year where the coaches were all volunteers, so based on last year we’ve already improved the program. This year, we have hired 3 experienced coaches and an athletic director who is on JLS faculty in the P.E. program.”
O’Kane said she offered to work with Haxton to prevent the cross-country community from getting divided.
“We always strive to make improvements and have invited Mr. Haxton to participate in improving our program,” O’Kane said. “Unfortunately, the creation of a second team claiming to represent JLS has only caused confusion for the students and parents. We would prefer that we could have one team instead of dividing the community.”
Haxton said that the city is trying to compete with his team.
“For the first time in three years, at least, they’re apparently trying to recruit coaches and create a separate team,” Haxton said. “The only reason that team has any traction is because they’re withholding this ability for our team to compete in the league meets.”
Haxton’s team currently has 62 student athletes enrolled. As for the city, Haxton said that fewer students are currently enrolled.
“The city claims they have over 20 [students] but it’ll be interesting to see how many actually practice,” Haxton said.
Arjan Mann, a seventh grader at JLS and a PAMSACO member, said Haxton’s impact on him was the reason he decided to join PAMSACO instead of the traditional JLS cross-country team.
“Last year, this team and coach Tom [Haxton] were the traditional cross country team. This year they wouldn’t let coach Tom be the coach,” Mann said. “I really enjoyed being coached by him, because he really challenged us, so I decided to join his team.”
Haxton said that his biggest priority is getting access to the league meets so that his athletes can compete. He said that he was told by the district that he needs to take it up with the city.
“I think the next step is to petition the school board and the city council,” Haxton said.
