Last week dueling guest columns in the USA TODAY prompted several days of impassioned letters from readers taking sides on the issue.

It wasn’t about gay marriage or bullying or Greek austerity or anything else prominent in the news the past few days.

It was about whether it’s time to stop funding high school athletics.

Arizona is not the only state facing enormous K-12 funding pressure. During the economic downturn the past few years nearly every state either reduced education funding or held funding flat.

School districts across the country have needed to find ways to do more with less and in an increasing number of school districts one of the ways they’ve found is the elimination of high school athletics.

Perhaps it’s time for Arizona, or at least Tucson’s metro school districts, to have the same discussion.

It’s not a topic alien to most high school teachers or district governing boards. Teachers talk about it in hushed whispers in school lounges almost as if they’re Harry Potter and Hermione Granger trying not to say the name of You Know Who.

School board members will quietly talk about it with each other from time to time, though never on the dais as an item on a board agenda.

That’s because this is such a passionate issue that just broaching it in an official way will bring out the proverbial torch and pitchfork hordes who will turn board meetings into such melees that they will make the recent TUSD MAS board meeting brouhahas look like old ladies’ tea parties.

It’s hard to factor the true cost of high school athletics by peering into the byzantine depths of school district budgets. There are some line items labeled “athletics,” mostly accounting for the salaries of athletics administrators and coaching stipends. Coaching stipends and administrators alone cost TUSD $2 million a year.

But buried deep in the budget are myriad costs associated with athletics that get rolled into catchall facility, transportation and supply budgets. When you account for all the miles of athletic tape, the electricity for lights, fertilizer and lawn mowers for grass, wear and tear on buses and dozens of other costs it adds up to millions.

Athletics do generate some revenue through player fees and ticket sales but that income doesn’t even come close to covering their true cost.

Moreover, these days it’s not good enough to just have a team, you must have the best team, and since district funding just covers the basics, most coaches who want to be “the best” turn their players into beggars. They send them out to wash cars or sell cookie dough or the like to raise money to buy new high-tech gadgets and other gear to give their athletes that extra winning edge. Many schools also have large booster clubs that sell shirts and soda and nachos to raise money for the latest Nike uniforms or to fund out-of-state trips for elite teams.

High school athletics is also a billion dollar industry. Not only do schools buy all this equipment from private vendors but other companies make fortunes off of student athletes through the sale of medals, trophies, letter jackets, team photos and so on.

So a school district not only has to contend with parent and student outrage if they broach the subject of athletics elimination, but lobbying from private industry who want to make the sure the athletics gravy train stays on the tracks.

To be sure, there are some benefits to student athletics. It helps build confidence and self esteem and student athletes tend to stay in school and get passing grades because of pass-to-play rules. But other benefits, such as engendering school spirit, have faded in the modern age.

Back in the day, the entire city would turn out for a Tucson High football game. Now the stands are barely half full on Friday nights. The days of raucous pep rallies, school fight songs and huge homecoming parades are over.

Most of the interest in athletics these days has more do with college scholarships than school spirit. Yet even college recruiting has become detached from high schools, save for football. Every sport now has an “off season” club season in which elite players play other elite players. Because the competition in these club programs is so good, top players are more likely to attract college scouts to their club games than their high school games.

We Americans are sports mad and high school athletics is a more than century-old tradition and traditions are hard to break.

It’s doubtful any school board in the region will have the courage to broach this issue if presented simply as elimination.

But what might happen if districts presented the issue as a choice? Rather than a one-sided discussion – to eliminate or not eliminate – what if districts asked voters every school board election what they wanted to fund for the next two years? Give them a choice, $10 million for athletics or $10 million for math and science teachers.

If voters choose athletics, than we’ll know for certain we value it as an important part of high school education.

If voters choose education, though, it won’t be the end of athletics. Club teams and city and county recreation programs are already there to fill the void.

Austerity is here to stay so school districts must squeeze every dollar they get to properly educate our children. Does it make sense to continue to spend millions on grass, lights, buses and coaches so kids can play with a ball after school?

Perhaps high school athletics is a tradition whose cost we can no longer afford.

Call Tucson City Councilman Paul Cunningham Mr. Soccer.

Major League Soccer, the nation’s premier professional soccer league, announced today that it will play a four-team, round robin tournament in February at Kino Sports Complex.

The MLS spring tourney is the latest, most significant step toward turning Tucson into a professional soccer “hub” for the western United States and toward replacing the millions of dollars sucked out of the region when Major League Baseball abandoned Tucson for Phoenix.

There are a lot of people responsible for bringing MLS to Tucson, most notably attorney Greg Foster, the owner of FC Tucson, a fledgling minor-league soccer team.

But Cunningham is the guy who tossed the snowball down the hill then ran behind it giving it a push now and then to keep the momentum going as it gathered local and regional support for bringing professional soccer to Tucson.

A year and a half ago when Cunningham was appointed to the City Council to fill the term of Rodney Glassman, who had left to tilt against John McCain’s windmill for U.S. Senate, Tucson had two empty MLB spring training baseball stadiums and no plan to do anything about it.

Cunningham, a soccer fan, thought soccer was the answer. When it comes to American professional sports, soccer rarely gets its due. Though it’s the world’s most popular professional sport, it has struggled here to gain a following.

Or so all the rich men making billions off of professional football, baseball, basketball and hockey want you to believe. Even tennis gets more love than soccer, it seems.

But for more than 20 years, soccer has been the most popular youth sport. More kids play soccer than football and baseball combined (most notably because girls play it, too), about 4 million last year.

Kids who play a sport learn to love it and to follow its pro component. In 2010, 4 million people attended MLS games, an average of about 16,000 a game, which is on par with the NBA and NHL, which both averaged about 17,000 fans a game that year.

Soccer’s fan base is big and growing. In March, two MLS teams played a tournament against FC Tucson and another minor league team and roughly 6,000 people packed Hi Corbett Field to watch each game, including nearly 10,000 for the championship game.

Cunningham, Foster, the county and MLS are betting that many and more will watch the four-team tourney this year.

But MLS Executive Vice President Nelson Rodriguez said today that MLS is committed to a much bigger presence in Tucson than a spring tourney. He said MLS wants Tucson to be the league’s western “hub” and wants to bring 12 to 18 teams here each year to train, plus host soccer conventions and youth tournaments during the rest of the year.

Cunningham and the city of Tucson filled one of the empty stadiums earlier this year when the University of Arizona agreed to move the school’s baseball team to Hi Corbett and to spend several million dollars renovating it in the process.

Hi Corbett is the city’s stadium. Kino is the county’s. And historically, the county and the city rarely cooperate on anything, including baseball stadiums.

So it was telling today that during a press conference to announce the MLS deal that Cunningham had a seat at the table with Foster, Rodriquez, county supervisors Richard Elias and Ramon Valadez, the Metropolitan Convention and Visitor’s Bureau Mexico liaison and the county’s sports tourism authority chairman.

Filling Kino stadium is more than the county’s problem, it’s the region’s and it will take regional cooperation to turn Tucson into the “hub” MLS is asking for.

Baseball brought an estimated $30 million a year into the local economy. What’s more, it helped the county at least break even on Kino Stadium.

We lost that income when baseball left and the county is now losing about $1 million a year on Kino.

Tucson and Pima County need to go all in on soccer. It will not only help the county pay the bills on Kino, but it will bring back almost all if not more of the money we lost when baseball left.

Professional soccer wants to make Tucson its home. Let’s open the door and let them in.

Goodbye Major League Baseball. In a week or so the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks will begin wrapping up their spring training stints here, bringing to an end  a 63-year tradition of big league baseball in Tucson as the two teams will train in Phoenix next year.

We’re sad to see you go but we understand, money talks and (what comes out of the south end of a northbound bull) walks.

Don’t expect any tears. We’re sad about the end of tradition and the loss of revenue, but not about the maltreatment the past few years as you tried to extort from us glitzy new stadiums that your billionaire owners didn’t want to pay for themselves.

In fact, you may have done us a huge favor. Now, rather than argue about whether to tax ourselves so that we can fight stadium wars with Phoenix, we’ve been given a couple of huge blank slates, fields actually, upon which we can create new traditions and revenues.

The county Board of Supervisors resurrected the Pima County Sports and Tourism Authority in 2008 in a last-ditch effort to save spring training. But now that the effort has failed, the authority has the opportunity to market the huge Kino Sports Complex and the smaller Hi Corbett Field to youth leagues.

Youth sports tournaments are a billion-dollar industry. Just one week-long tournament already here, the Fort Lowell Soccer Shootout, generates about $3 million every January for the local economy. That’s about 10 percent of the $30 million MLB spring training generated in two months each year.

That tournament is named after the park where it started but it quickly outgrew Fort Lowell Park and is now held all over town, causing headaches for teams and parents as they shuttle across the city looking for their assigned fields each day.

Kino and Corbett could host the whole thing and be a marketing boon to an already huge tournament.

Just a handful of soccer, baseball, softball and football youth tournaments each year could equal or surpass the economic impact of spring training.

One of the handicaps of having spring training was the restriction the leagues put on using “their” fields during the 10 months they weren’t in town. The billionaire owners didn’t want their millionaire athletes tearing an Achilles tendon on a heavily used field. That’s over. We can use OUR fields as we see fit.

Of course, the city and the county will need to cooperate in this effort since the city owns Hi Corbett and the county Kino. Each facility will need some updating and improvements to turn them into multiuse facilities.

And the Sports Authority needs to drop the silly deal it’s negotiating with Japanese pro baseball in a last gasp effort to keep some tenuous grip on MLB spring training in Tucson.

And voters will need to give the authority a couple of bucks through a tax district that the Legislature will need to create, so that the money is there to develop the facilities and market them.

But those obstacles are easily overcome assuming our regional leaders are wise enough to recognize the opportunity they’ve been given.

The MLB’s departure may turn out to be the best thing pro baseball has ever done for Tucson.

So long fellas, it was fun while it lasted. Don’t let the door hit you in the (south end of a northbound baseball player) on the way out of Tucson.