Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Give thanks for football — and community

By J. FRANK LYNCH
jflynch@theCitizenNews.com

To the diehard fan of high school football, the ultimate Thanksgiving thrill isn’t knowing there’s an extra pan of dressing in the oven, it’s knowing your team plays the next night.

That’s because, since the very advent of time, the second round of Georgia’s high school playoffs has fallen on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Without fail until last year, the third round was always scheduled the week I took vacation. It was a nice incentive for me, but when I quit taking the time off, the Georgia High School Association for some reason didn’t move the playoff date.

The semifinal round — the one played in the Georgia Dome and shown live on Georgia Public Television — always falls on the weekend nearest my sister’s birthday.

For many years, until dance school productions of “The Nutcracker” took over their lives and made them strangers during the season, her family would have everyone over the second Saturday in December for endless pots of birthday chili and, oddly, crab stew.

When it turned dark we’d go outside to admire the brother-in-law’s elaborate (yet elegant, per the prenuptial agreement) holiday light display. But in the between time, all would gather in the living room, where live broadcasts of the semifinal games at the Georgia Dome would be the focus of attention.

“That boy from Cedartown has committed to Auburn,” somebody would say, and everyone in the room would sigh deeply and shake their heads while the brother-in-law chuckled with glee.

The semifinals being the second week in December means, of course, that the state title games are played the Friday and Saturday before Christmas. Far from a sacrilege, I think the Valdostas and Parkviews of the world consider playing for a state title a holiday tradition like hanging stockings and drinking eggnog, if anyone really drinks eggnog.

Just once in my life has the team from my alma mater played on the day after Thanksgiving. The year was 1980, and Coach Charles Winslette’s Fayette County Tigers enjoyed the turkey and all the trimmings that year holding a 10-1 record and 4th place ranking in Class AAAA, then Georgia’s largest.

The Tigers had run right through Region 6-AAAA during the regular season, taking a 9-0 record to Griffin the week Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter for the White House, and on the very Friday night CBS aired the episode that answered the question, “Who shot J.R.?”

Griffin was also 9-0 on the season and ranked No. 1, and the winner would earn home-field advantage for the region championship game back in the day Georgia still played region championships.

The rest, as they say, is history. While the world was finding out that Kristin shot J.R., Griffin was beating Fayette County 14-7 (though many who were there dispute it).

A Tiger team determined to get revenge and march on to Valdosta easily manhandled Morrow in the subregion title game, setting up a Fayette-Griffin rematch for the 4-AAAA Championship in Griffin on — you guessed it — the day after turkey day.

Thanksgivings have never been the same since.

The details are too painful to recollect, but the Tigers finished 9-2 that year, losing to Griffin 7-3 (though many who were there dispute it).

And now you know why, to a generation of Fayette Countians, Griffin remains a place we reluctantly venture only when in need of socks.

I tell you all this in an attempt to bring comfort and joy to the Sandy Creek Patriots, who I fully expected to see play at The Battlefield in Tyrone this Friday. But Coach Rodney Walker’s 10-0 team, only the second local squad ever to carve out a perfect season on the gridiron, lost in the first round last week to the Bainbridge Bearcats.

They say the Patriots played their worst game of the year, and the Bearcats (is it a bear? is it a cat?) turned in their best. That’s the way it goes sometimes. It can’t seem possible now, but one day those players will learn that there are worse things in life than losing in the first round.

But it’s especially painful when a team as good as the 5th-ranked Pats gets knocked out of the running so soon. Most everybody in the state said they were a shoo-in to play in the Dome on my sister’s birthday, and I planned to be there now that “The Nutcracker” has shoved her chili-and-lights fest aside.

As far as I know, the Creek didn’t jinx its post-season chances by printing up thousands of T-shirts that bragged “Three At Home and Then the Dome,” as my Tiger boosters did back in 1997 when Fayette County last found itself state-ranked and in the driver’s seat.

No, I’m sure the Sandy Creek boosters did their homework on that one, and they brought evidence of that to the Nov. 17 Board of Education meeting.

Asking to speak that night were Coach Walker and booster officers Butch Bennett, Gary Teal and Mickey Littlefield. They were not there to ask for money, as one might expect on the eve of a state playoff run, but rather to talk about what they had made of the little Tyrone school tucked into a forgotten corner of Fayette County, the one that since opening its doors in 1991 never seemed to get the respect it deserved.

“After all my years in coaching, we moved to Fayette County and I came across my ‘family’ five years ago,” said Walker, who boasts one of the best records of any active Georgia coach. “I’m just proud to be a member of this Fayette County family.”

That family, explained Teal, made it possible for the Sandy Creek supporters to pay off and close a $125,000 line of credit that Teal took out in his own name to help fund a variety of upgrades at the school, including construction of a 7,000 square-foot multipurpose fieldhouse facility that cost the Boosters in excess of $500,000 but the taxpayers of Fayette County not one dime.

They call it “The Sandy Creek Model.”

“We like to say, ‘We took a dream and built it,’” said Teal. “We also took out a loan and paid it.”

Despite the results of Friday’s game, Sandy Creek has earned a reputation that didn’t exist before, said Teal. The payoff is newfound respect from the community and an overall better attitude among the school’s 1,300 students, the largest enrollment ever. SAT scores at the school took a dramatic leap last year after a steady decline, and Sandy Creek’s Junior Air Force ROTC program enrolls 10 percent of the student body.

That’s something anybody in Fayette County should be proud of, whether Tiger, Chief, Panther, Wildcat or Patriot.

“The one thing I can hope to say we’ve accomplished at Sandy Creek is that we’ve made a better school,” Coach Walker told board members last week, adding, “And we’ve made a better community.”

Anybody want to stand up and cheer?