Georgia High School Association member schools will play 49 games against teams from other states this fall, but the growth in those interstate games isn’t just for national exposure. According to one longtime athletic director who has scheduled those games for years, usually it is just to fill out a schedule.
In general, out-of-state opponents are on the schedule of two types of high schools. They appear with state powers and smaller schools near the state line.
For the powerful schools, the games are scheduled to give the school or its players national exposure. Schools pay more attention to national rankings, and it is difficult to move up in the rankings if a school does not have a resume against national powers. Sometimes the games are brokered by third parties, often television networks. Dexter Wood, longtime AD at Buford High School, has experience with the made-for-TV game. Those games, he said, can be nice and often generate a lot of excitement. But they don’t always generate huge financial windfalls.
Mostly, the network pays travel expenses. That helps, Wood said, because normally travel expenses are deducted from the gate receipts. Still, for Buford, the main reason to schedule the games is the difficulty in finding 10 opponents in Georgia willing to play. “For us, it comes down to getting a 10-game schedule,” he said. Buford has three such games on the schedule this year, including one against a team from New York.
Two schools in Georgia have four games against out-of-state opponents this year, but the programs are on opposite ends of the spectrum and scheduled the games for very different reasons.
Grayson High School will play a pair of Alabama schools, one from Florida and will travel to Shreveport, La., this fall. Grayson won Georgia’s AAAAAAA state championship last year, and the team is looking for national recognition. Both schools from Alabama won state championships in their classes last season, and one – Hoover – is among the most successful programs nationally over the past decade or so. The other two schools are powers in their states.
On the other hand, Pataula Charter School also has four such opponents, all from Florida. The small school in the southwest corner of Georgia played its first varsity football season last year. This year, it will play four small Florida schools.
Buford and Grayson face schools some distance from home, but the undisputed champion in that category this year is Colquitt County. It will host a school from Murrieta, Calif. That is almost 2,300 miles from Moultrie.
Many of the out-of-state games are scheduled for simple convenience. A rural school near a state line may find it easier to cross that line to play a similar school than travel deep into Georgia for an in-state game. Most of the games – 46 in fact – are against schools from states that border Georgia.
Wood said he wasn’t concerned with people who suggested that playing high school sports on a national level was somehow against the spirit of the game. “Each individual school is going to have to assess that,” he said.
The GHSA, which governs high school sports in Georgia, takes a similar approach. GHSA spokesman Steve Figueroa said for the most part, scheduling out-of-state opponents in any sport is a local matter. The exception is that GHSA schools are no longer able to schedule opponents who are not full members of a state association. That meant that Grayson High School had to replace one of its opponents from 2016. IMG Academy, a Florida football power, is only an affiliate of the Florida association, so no Georgia school is allowed to schedule IMG.
Figueroa pointed out that out-of-state games are not limited to football. A quick check of the GHSA web site confirms that schools from outside Georgia solicit Georgia opponents in most sports. He said the GHSA does not plan to regulate such games.
