Many small colleges across the U.S. continue to count on their athletic coaches to perform extra duty by being bus drivers, shuttling their teams and other students to out-of-town sporting events.

Faced with tighter and tighter budgets, the practice may be increasing, possibly putting the schools, their athletes and others at increased risk.

And while the policy may save the schools some money over the years, there are those in the motorcoach industry who question the safety of colleges using their own employees -- rather than hiring private carriers with professional drivers -- to handle such road trips.

"Sure, it hurts the bus operators, but much more than that its an important safety issue," asserts Freida Gould, co-owner of Acme Bus Tours in Kankakee, Ill. "It can be unsafe."

She says the schools sometimes ignore federal hours-of-service rules and the coaches often are too stressed after a game to drive the team home safely.

In addition, she said some schools add to the problem by allowing students to drive school-owned vans that do not require the drivers to have commercial drivers licenses.

"I know they do it because Ive seen some of them pull out of the parking lots, and I would not want my kids to be riding in them," she said.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration says it has long been aware of schools using employees to drive buses and vans, and it does what it can within its authority to make certain they follow safety rules.

"Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations place responsibility on the carrier (private company, a contractor to a school district, or the school district itself) for ensuring that employee bus operators are properly licensed and credentialed for the type of vehicle they are operating, that the bus operators are medically qualified, and that the bus operators are subject to periodic random drug and alcohol testing," said FMCSA spokesman Duane DeBruyne.

He noted, too, that while most school operations are only intrastate and are under the jurisdiction of state regulators, the FMCSA regularly conducts educational visits and nonrated compliance reviews, including issues involving commercial drivers licenses and drug and alcohol testing.

What schools say

School officials maintain their long-time practice of using coaches to drive buses is mostly due to budget restraints.

"Everything is done very prudently at our school and our area is no exception," said Ted Peterson, athletic director of the Kankakee Community College in Kankakee, which requires the coaches of its five sports to have commercial drivers licenses as part of their employment.

He said the school is aware of the requirement that bus drivers must have commercial licenses and the federal restrictions on how many hours they can drive at any one time.

"If it were going to be illegal, then we would charter a bus from a private company," he stressed.

Peterson said charters normally are used for out-of-state or overnight trips, although a coach may take an overnight run if the team is going to play a game in one city, spend the night there and then stop at another city on the way home for another game.

"Its been working out well for us," he added.

Variations on a theme

Others schools offer variations to the practice, including Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Ill., which not only requires its 13 head coaches to have commercial licenses, but graduate assistants assigned to each of the coaches to have them as well.

Athletic Department spokeswoman Dawn Waldron said the graduate assistants, all of whom are working on their masters degrees, serve as the regular drivers and the coaches act as backups, which allows them to concentrate on their games.

"Having coaches drive can be stressful, thinking about the game, and that can be very distracting." she said.

In Columbia, Md., Howard Community College uses its coaches to drive school-owned buses, but augments the practice by hiring people from outside the school to also drive. The school helps these occasional employees to obtain their commercial licenses and trains them on the buses they are going to drive for the school.

"I personally dont like the idea of coaches driving, but we have to do it sometimes from a money standpoint," said Diane Schumacher, the schools athletic director.

However, she said the school is taking a new look at its transportation program and plans to meet soon with charter companies in the area to see if they might be able to save more money by contracting with a private carrier.

"In a perfect scenario, we would charter," she added.

Miles Community College in Miles City, Mont., uses charters to transport its baseball, basketball and volley ball teams, but has its coaches drive its golf and rodeo teams to their out-of-town contests.

The three community colleges that belong to the Orange Coast Community College District in Southern California rely on the districts transportation department and its buses and drivers to handle all of their travel.

Drivers drive, coaches ...

Many others use only private charter companies.

"We let our coaches do the coaching and let bus drivers do the driving so that the coaches can focus on the athletics," said Bob Zelinski, director of athletics and wellness at Central Florida Community College in Ocala, Fla.

Phil Wrighthouse of St. Joseph College in Rensselaer, Ind., said that school uses charters for all of its sports transportation. "We have never had coaches driving," he said.

Because of the wide range of transportation plans across the country, the FMCSA said parents should be proactive and find out who is doing the driving and what types of vehicles are being used at the schools their children attend.

"A good question to ask is: How long is the driving distance one-way? If the answer is more than five hours, then two drivers will be required. Putting children in jeopardy is not worth the risk of skirting federal safety regulations," emphasized DeBruyne.

Meantime, private operators should be proactive, too, in trying to win over some of the transportation work now being done by the colleges on their own, suggests Ken Presley, vice president of the United Motorcoach Association.

"We encourage operators to visit these institutions regularly to review the possibilities of taking over their charter operations," he said. "Remember, for-hire operators should be the pinnacle of operations in driver training, maintenance and operations. Often when institutions discover they cannot charter without for-hire operating authority and the associated cost, they decide it is not for them."

He said that over the years many schools have simply found that the ownership and operation of a motorcoach proved to be very expensive and difficult to justify when all of the costs of ownership were amortized over the few trips they make annually.

Among them was North Caroline A&T, which accepted two leased motorcoaches from its alumni association but was not up to running them on their own.

Enter David Brown, owner of Holiday Tours in Randleman, who worked out a deal to maintain and operate them for the school. And, when the five-year lease on the buses expired last July, he managed to sell the school on the idea of turning in the buses and letting his company charter all of its trips.

Brown said he emphasized to school officials that using a charter service would work out better for them because they would be relieved of the liability exposure and the federal regulations they faced under the initial arrangement.

"We told them that we would be taking care of all of that for them and they would not have to worry about it," Brown said.