Chris Whitfield: A 'fair' take on the state of Class A

There is just one Class A program among the eight high schools that participate in athletics in Murray and Whitfield counties, and Christian Heritage won’t even compete in the Georgia High School Association until next year. But recent moves by the GHSA to split private and public schools in Class A during the postseason could affect the entire state.

The split is going to be for all championship sports, but let’s just focus on football for a minute, because it’s the sport that ripples through all others.

While there may have been snide remarks about private school domination when it came to volleyball and tennis and cross country state titles, it wasn’t until the final four teams in the Class A state football playoffs were all private schools that small, rural public schools made a significant push for a split between the two entities.

I graduated from a private school, and we played in the Georgia Independent School Association during my freshman and sophomore years before joining the GHSA. The main reason for the switch was travel concerns, because we were taking at least two trips from Savannah to Macon during football season, and the costs only multiplied with other sports.

And I wasn’t recruited to play at a private school any more than I believe that open-enrollment public schools like Dalton or Calhoun or Buford recruit athletes. The only recruiting that I can ever remember was when we would convince the foreign exchange student to be the kicker because the alternative was an offensive lineman putting the boot on for the straight-on-toe kick.

I have covered high school sports at newspapers across the state since I was 17 and started working for the Savannah Morning News in fall 1990. I have been fortunate to work some pretty good beats during my time all across this great state of ours, covering sports large and small, large schools and small schools, public schools and private schools.

High school sports and the people who coach and play the games have not been just a job for me during the past three decades, but a passion. Having said all that, here is my take on the situation.

Separating public and private is wrong ... and right.

It is just as wrong now as it was when the majority of the private schools were founded in the late 1960s and early ’70s as an escape from segregation. There were other ways to address the current problem rather than separating the two entities, but in our litigious society, you can’t bring back the multiplier (private school enrollment was multiplied by 1.5 for nearly a decade and then disappeared under threat of legislation); with the state of our state’s legislature, the push for private school vouchers has created a system of using tax dollars for private school education.

The GHSA has tried to adapt to these changes with rules and by closing loopholes, and private schools can no more provide straight tuition to an athlete than a city school system. These are the rules that the GHSA has come up with, and they apply. If a school is breaking those rules, then turn them in and the GHSA will investigate — and you can ask Dalton High if you don’t believe me.

The split is right because the playing field IS unfair.

Take my old high school for example. Savannah Christian is a Class A school, but has a “service area” of all of Chatham County — nearly 500,000 people. That number gets even bigger when you consider that as long as you enter a school as a ninth-grader, it doesn’t matter where you live, because you are eligible by GHSA rules.

By contrast, Wilcox County — which has one of the leading schools in the push for the split — has a population of 9,000, and the school doesn’t have open enrollment. That is an advantage that all metro-area private schools have.

But the split is wrong because no one said life was fair, and I fear we have turned Class A into the kind of tournament where everyone gets a trophy for showing up. That’s fine for my 5-year-old playing tee ball in Cohutta, but it shouldn’t be the expectation for a kid learning more valuable lessons than just winning while working his tail off in the hot summer sun in places like Soperton or Rochelle.

Can Treutlen or Wheeler County or Montgomery County or Bryan County or Our Lady of Mercy or Whitefield Academy consistently compete for state titles on the football field? No, they cannot, and that is not a knock on the kids or the coaches but a realistic portrait of the economic and societal realities in which we live under.

Every now and then a Calvary Baptist or a Johnson County will put together a run in the state playoffs, but we all know every year which handful of schools are legitimate state title contenders, and that number hasn’t gotten bigger, we’ve just doubled the number of titles — not the number of contenders. That’s the reality, and we all know that reality isn’t fair.

Ask Southeast Whitfield how fair life is when most of the top athletes in the county have the option of playing at Dalton with its storied tradition and its large booster club. Ask the schools in Class 2A how fair it is to have to compete against the Buford and Calhoun machines. Ask Dublin or Carrollton for a list of how many of their greatest players in school history didn’t live anywhere near the city limits. These are all public institutions, and they are not breaking any rules by drawing from outside of their school districts.

But you can bet those schools are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

If you do one thing for private schools, then addressing open-enrollment city schools has to be next on the agenda, and that is the fear of some. Buford athletic director Dexter Wood even commented on it to the Atlanta media when the vote to split Class A was taken. Buford is a city school that allows all of Gwinnett County (population: 855,000) to apply for entrance.

Before talk of the split came about, former Daily Citizen sports writer Drew Brantley did an analysis of city schools versus their county counterparts, and in every case but one (Thomasville vs. Thomas County Central) the city school has an overwhelming win-loss record against the county.

Georgia’s smallest class has always been a have and a have-not situation. Since 1976, the state’s lowest classification has seen the football title won by 18 different schools. Eight have won multiple championships.

Lincoln County has the most, with 11 in that time frame, and I am sorry Devil fans if you can’t comprehend the irony of coach Larry Campbell complaining about recruiting and transfers, since people in the Augusta area have been saying the exact same thing for three decades about the Devils — and I respect coach Campbell immensely.

With the split, all we have done is narrow down the list of teams that can legitimately win a state title, even though we are multiplying state titles by two in the class. The schools that have always dominated the class, either through more money or better coaching, will continue to do so — both public and private.

Chris Whitfield is a sports writer for The Daily Citizen. You can write to him at chriswhitfield@daltoncitizen.com.

Sports

Search Results

Discussion

Site Map

Contact Us