Athletes and school districts, including Abbotsford's, may have to pony up additional cash to help keep the province's school sports sanctioning body up and running.

B.C. School Sports, which oversees regional and provincial competitions with the assistance of sports commissions, is scrambling to raise funds after the province pulled a $130,000 operating grant, roughly 30 per cent of the organization's operating revenue of just under $500,000.

Large districts with populations over 10,000, such as School District 34, will be asked to pay $3,000. Smaller districts will be requested to pay $1,500 to keep the organization running until the end of the year.

Students may also have to pay higher athletic fees, B.C. School Sports executive director Sue Keenan said.

"We are tacking on additional administration fees and we've gone back to superintendents and districts and we're saying, 'look where we're at, we are desperate,' " she said.

The organization, which oversees sports such as basketball, football, soccer, rugby, and golf, may have to look at scaling back some inter-school competitions to stay afloat, said Keenan. B.C. School Sports also organizes 47 provincial sports championships each year.

Cindy Schafer, the chair of the Abbotsford School Board, said it would be up to local trustees to decide whether to hand $3,000 over to B.C. School Sports. She would not say how likely that is to happen.

Schafer did warn, however, that she expects money for schools to be tighter this year in light of the province's well-documented financial problems.

"We are preparing for the fact it could be a little more dicey here with some of the financial implications," she said.

"It's unfortunate, and we do value the work of B.C. School Sports . . . but I think everybody is going to be impacted by the purse strings being tightened this year."

The minister responsible for amateur sport in B.C. said the cuts to B.C. School Sports weren't made lightly.

Ida Chong, the minister of healthy living and sport, said her ministry had to review all grants to protect education and health funding in light of an "unprecedented" reduction in revenue to provincial coffers.

- with files Diane Strandberg and Larry Pruner