When you buy a bag of popcorn, or a piece of pizza at the game, you're helping support high school athletics.

"We have fundraisers throughout the year," Susan Tague of the Okemos High School Athletic Boosters said. "Concessions of course is a big one for us."

For years booster clubs have helped supply the extras -- the niceties for student athletes. But things are different now.

"We've started to contribute things like bats, balls, uniforms even," Val Frankfort said.

"In today's economy the boosters are supplying the needed things," Tom Hunt said.

Hunt is the athletic director at East Lansing High School. He said when he asked for a new wrestling mat this year, the booster club delivered. Recently,the EL club donated $30,000 so kids wouldn't have to pay even more to play half way through the year.

"We were asked to cut $50,000 from our athletic budget this year," Hunt said.

As school funding continues to drop in this state, booster clubs are going to have to pick up the pieces said John Johnson of the MHSAA.

You talk to an AD and they say our boosters have got to raise much more money because we got our budget cut," Johnson said. "It's happening at a lot of schools."

The problem with all of this some say, is very soon it will become obvious which school's booster clubs have the most money to help out and which ones do not.

"It's unfair because not everyone has the same income and you do run the risk of the haves and the have nots," Tague said.

That's of course, unless the state can come up with a hail mary idea, but many say don't count on it.

"Where would you be without the boosters?" News Ten asked Hunt.

"We would be in deep trouble,"Hunt said.