Political football: Gold Dome 1, GHSA 0
By Todd Holcomb | Monday, January 14, 2008, 12:03 PM
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The AJC’s Todd Holcomb discusses important issues in Georgia prep sports and takes your comments.
If you don’t like the rules of the Georgia High School Association, should you call your legislator?
It wouldn’t hurt.
Sen. Mitch Seabaugh (R-Sharpsburg) deserves the credit for the GHSA’s decision last week to drop seating requirements for the quarterfinals of the state football playoffs.
The GHSA would’ve been better to study the issue and make a more thought-out decision in the spring, but executive director Ralph Swearngin pushed for a quick resolution.
“If we don’t make a decision today, it will be made under the Golden Dome in a matter of weeks,” he said. “I do not like to be threatened, but there comes a time when we’ve got to take some steps to make as informed a decision as we can make right now.”
Later, Skip Yow, the GHSA’s legislative liaison, was equally blunt: “Our problems in the legislature are not going away. It’s typical of how laws are made. One person has a problem, and there’s a new law. That’s called politics.” Yow was talking about Seabaugh, who had sponsored a bill that questioned the GHSA’s authority to require schools to build facilities to a certain level in order to have a home football game.
The General Assembly has influenced several GHSA rules this decade, some for the better, others not.
In the case of Newnan, the GHSA rule didn’t work. Newnan’s stadium could have accommodated the crowd that ended up going 35 miles to Jonesboro to see Newnan play North Gwinnett.
But that doesn’t mean seating requirements are inappropriate in most cases. Lincoln County’s Larry Campbell told horror stories of road playoff games where fans sat on the ground and couldn’t see or didn’t go at all because the visitors side had fewer than 1,000 seats, sometimes as few as 300.
So here are my questions:
• Does a school have a right to host a playoff game, even if all it has is 100 yards of grass and a dozen folding chairs on the sidelines?
• Did the GHSA really care about seating problems? Or were the adjusted stadium seating requirements - which forced the 2006 Class AAAAA championship game to move to a neutral site - simply an end-around to get the state finals moved to the Georgia Dome?
• Should the GHSA give in to the legislature when it would make a better decision on its own?
• If you were a legislator, which GHSA rules would you threaten?
