Just like the rest of us in the non-academic community, Oak Harbor High School is feeling the “trickle down” effect of rising oil and gas prices.

A recent school district proposal wanted to raise the athletic fees to $100 per player per sport to offset rising costs, but that amount has been reduced to a more economically affordable figure.

Either way, I was informed by Wildcats’ athletic director Nikki Luper that the majority of the expenses incurred by the athletic department go to pay for transportation costs.

Ms. Luper said that approximately 70 to 75 percent of the budget is used to put gasoline and diesel fuel into the busses to transport teams.

Any way you want to look at it, that’s a bunch of money being spent.

So who is to blame? If you don’t know the answer you haven’t been reading the newspaper or watching television, and you definitely shouldn’t think about being the next contestant on “Jeopardy.”

While the big oil companies make record profits and the smug oil sheiks from the Middle East smile and promise to produce more, Oak Harbor High School has to try and figure out a way to get teams to and from WesCo North games in busses that suck down fuel faster than a five-year-old attacking a chocolate shake from Jack in the Box.

Right now, there isn’t anything schools can do about the problem of transportation costs.

Playing games at a neutral site somewhere in between the two schools is out of the question and reducing the number of teams a school has only hurt the student-athletes even more.

Nothing is going to change until some smart person invents a bus that runs on water or solar power.

Not too long ago, I somehow got on a sports email list and they started sending me daily results from a “big money” golf tournament held at the Abu Dhabi Golf Club in the United Arab Emirates.

I’ll tell you what, those daily snippets of information made “The Kid” grumpy! Needless to say, you folks didn’t see any of the information published in the Whidbey News-Times.

Just what I needed to see, a character in sunglasses and a white robe presenting someone with a jeweled scimitar or a huge gold plate for winning the tournament. All the while, the cash register continues to ring and the oil profits keep rolling in.

What got me the hottest under the collar was a picture of a group of sheiks standing next to a thoroughbred racehorse one of them had purchased for $2 million plus. I guess you gotta spend your money on something and there hasn’t been a big art heist lately.

I grew up in the George Carlin era, so sometimes my mind drifts over to the flip side of things. There has to be a correlation between horses, horsepower, people who make a lot of money, high fuel prices and folks who have to choose between heating and eating.

I have a wish for all you big-time oil barons, I hope all your horses strike out at the Breeder’s Cup in October. At least until fuel prices return to reasonable figures and schools on Whidbey Island won’t have to bankrupt athletic budgets transporting teams to games.