So, the first week of the high school football season is over, and I’m glad we got it done — just not for some of the more traditional reasons.
I’ve been covering high school sports, primarily in Georgia, for more than 15 years, and the first week was always fun, but stressful. Fun because it’s always good to welcome back the sport in the south that still reigns as king.
Whenever you have something like football that engages people the way it does in SEC country, it’s always going to be fun. It’s crazy, though, because football is king even in areas of the south that don’t have good programs challenging for championships. That makes it doubly fun.
In times past, what made it stressful for me as a sports writer was the fact that Week One was always the day when we wondered about how well our coverage plans were going to turn out. If games went long, would we be able to get them done in time to allow our page designers to meet deadlines?
It was stressful, but even that was fun because, for a news person, there’s nothing like the adrenaline that comes with trying to get your finished product done with flair and on time.
This year, though, I felt a different level of stress that had nothing to do with deadlines, page design or games running late. It was the stress of wondering whether or not we would get through the first week of games without anymore violent outbreaks.
It was the stress of having a plan concocted in the back of your mind on how you would cover it if something crazy were to break out at a game.
It’s the kind of stress that shouldn’t be a part of something like high school football.
Thankfully, we got through it with no additional problems. But the issues of violence that have plagued the CSRA during the first couple of weeks of the school year caused the angst and trepidation that made us hold our breath a bit, hoping that the only tussles we’d have to cover were the ones in the field of play.
While at Burke County for the annual rivalry game against Thomson, though the atmosphere was charged with a festive vibe fit for high-stakes football, you didn’t have to go far the stadium to be reminded of “the other stuff.”
Burke County Sheriff’s Department made good on its promise to increase patrols at the game. Thankfully, they didn’t have to work too hard, outside of helping someone pull their car out of a ditch near the parking lot after the game.
Josey responded to its Week 1 turmoil by giving new coach Lawrence Pinkney a 1-0 record after the Eagles traveled to Savannah to win a game that was originally supposed to be played at Josey before a school shooting shut the school down for a couple of days.
Butler, which had to cancel its originally scheduled season opener with Cross Creek as a result of fights breaking out at the school, will have to wait until next Friday, Sept. 1 to get on the field. And from what I can tell, the area’s other games went off without a hitch.
And while I’m glad that things seemed to work out as well as possible, considering the circumstances, I felt a twinge of sadness that these cautionary measures had to be installed in the first place.
When things like school violence happens, it doesn’t just affect the parties directly involved. It affects everyone.
When high school football games have to be cancelled, rearranged, etc. because of violence in and around the school community, nobody wins, including the students, athletes and coaches, cheerleaders and band members that have nothing to do with the issues at hand.
Instead, in the case of Butler and Cross Creek, athletes who worked so hard during an offseason to prepare for a minimum of 10 games has one of those taken off their schedule. That’s one less chance to play their way into potential scholarships.
It’s one less opportunity for schools to benefit from gate revenue.
It’s one Friday that keeps certain students out of a game they love and away from a football family they need to help keep them grounded, focused and out of trouble.
It impacts the security of the students. It makes coaches, faculty and staff more leery and paranoid. It keeps parents on edge. It makes teachers feel like they have to put just as much energy into preparing to defuse combat as they do in developing lesson plans.
That’s not fair for anyone. And, I’m gonna go old school here and say that it’s also not fair to place blame or chief responsibility on the teachers, coaches, faculty and staff at our schools for why these incidents happen.
Sure, every stakeholder in a community should have at least a piece of ownership in the well-being of a community. We all have a part to play to help our kids, especially, feel safe in their educational and athletic environments.
But the chief onus for this falls on the home. It falls on parents and guardians — those who have the most access and the biggest level of influence on these young ones.
Let me borrow a phrase that’s based on a Bible verse: “Charity begins at home.” So should a child’s discipline.
Coaches, teachers, educators, pastors, counselors, mentors — they’re supposed to have the responsibility of undergirding what has been instilled into a child from that child’s home and parents. It’s unfair to think that they should shoulder the responsibility of teaching these kids, from scratch, to be respectful, honorable and kind, and to stay away from activities, people and places that could cause them a premature demise.
That’s a parent’s job. And if parents aren’t available, then whomever that kid’s guardians are must step up and take that responsibility.
The schools can’t do it all. The coaches and athletic programs can’t do it all. And I’ll even concede that parents and guardians can’t do it all either. But they should be the ones doing it first and foremost.
I know that there are always extenuating circumstances that make things difficult, and I’m certainly not trying to sound preachy or self righteous. But the truth is the truth. We have to do better for our kids, our youth, our students.
We have to limit the finger pointing and start building systems that accentuate camaraderie and cooperation between parents, students, schools, community stakeholders, family members and the young people they’re trying to raise.
As a father of a pre-teen seventh grader, I fully understand the difficulty in raising a child at this age and in this time. Even when you do your best and when you think you’ve crossed every “T” and dotted every “I,” you realize that at some point, the child will make his or her own choices in terms of what they’ll involve themselves in.
None of us are going to get it right all the time. But it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.
I am grateful that the recent rash of violence across the CSRA is sparking different levels of conversation regarding solutions. I’m going to take part in some of those conversations myself this week. What I hope is that those conversations are solutions based and not blame based or bashing either parents and guardians or school faculty and staff.
I also hope that as the football season, and overall sports calendar, shifts into high gear over the next several weeks, we won’t have to delay, deny or alter opportunities for our student-athletes to do what they love because things that many of them have nothing to do with.
I know the Augusta area community is better than what we’ve seen recently. And if these unfortunate incidents give us the opportunity to see that “better” rise up for the sake of ensuring safety and maximum productivity in our school communities, then I’ll be happy to say that even the unfortunate circumstances of the last couple of weeks have served a grand purpose.
Gabriel Stovall is the sports editor of the Augusta Press. He can be reached at Gabriel@theaugustapress.com.
