High Schools: Georgia prep football is big business, big bucks

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Mar/Apr 2000 by Fish, Mike

In the small towns and one-school communities across Georgia, life has historically revolved around the fate of the high school football team.

I was already kicking around the idea of a season-long package that would reveal just how important the game is to these communities - the role of parent-run touchdown clubs; the level of local and state tax movies spent on football, particularly for coaching salaries; and the status enjoyed by high school football coaches.

Then, the letter came across my desk.

It was an invitation from the pastor of a congregation in Macon, writing in his capacity as secretary/treasurer of the Westside High School football booster club. The club, he explained, wanted to show off its new football complex. And if The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspapers were so inclined, the boosters would gladly take a reporter up in a helicopter for a bird's-eye view of the complex.

The thought of parents raising almost $2 million to build a football complex - not on school property but rather on land owned by its football booster club - was enough to convince the newspaper's editors that this was a story worth pursuing.

The idea behind "Pay Dirt! The Big Business of High School Football" was to explore what separates the winners from the losers, the box-office successes from the failures. To do so, I teamed up with David Milliron, the newspaper's director of computerassisted reporting. We built a comprehensive database of the nearly 2,400 high school football coaches and assistant coaches in the state.

Forming a game plan

Since teacher salary and personnel information is kept at the local school district level, the newspaper compiled an electronic database from information obtained from each of the state's 180 school districts - including payroll records, teaching certificates and teaching assignments. The AJC also obtained in electronic form the state's annual school report card data, which contained such information as school enrollments and average district salary data for teachers, administrators and support personnel. The database was built in Microsoft Excel and the analysis performed in Microsoft Access.

The data were collected using the state's Open Records Act, which mandates the release of such information. Once each school district responded, the data were entered into the computer, and a "proof sheet" was then printed out for each of the state's 180 school districts. The "proof sheets" were then mailed back to the school districts for verification of the information. The AJC sent out a third round of mailings and made numerous telephone calls to obtain 100 percent compliance. The last survey was faxed to the newspaper by a secretary just prior to leaving her office to attend her mother's funeral, the day before publication.

While Milliron handled the survey and data collection, I spent my time interviewing coaches, administrators and booster club members. Many schools and administrators thought we were prying and refused to cooperate, but some expressed pride in their accomplishments. I eventually narrowed my reporting to three schools to illustrate how the big business of high school football has evolved in Georgia.

What the newspaper found was a startlingly well-financed support system for the game, one rivaling the model found on big-time college football campuses. Statistics suggest that interest in high school football is waning nationwide, but that certainly isn't true in Georgia. The established programs in southern Georgia continue to drum up huge financial and fan support. But increasingly, the Friday night fever has spread to the wealthier Atlanta suburbs, evidenced by the fancy stadiums - some with their own lounge boxes, spiffy weight rooms and well-appointed booster club headquarters.

The final score

Georgia may still struggle to shore up a comparatively weak public school academic record, but schools and taxpayers spare little expense to field competitive football teams. Our package questioned whether education is being compromised for playing games. Consider:

Nearly $80 million in state tax dollars went to pay coaches' teaching contracts last year, although nearly a third have minimal or no teaching workload. Georgia taxpayers contribute through local school taxes another $9.6 million annually in supplemental pay for football coaches.

Head football coaches make an average salary of nearly 55 percent more than the average for the state's teachers - $55,686 compared with $36,042.

The earnings of 10 individual coaches each exceed the $75,724 annual pay for the state's lieutenant governor.

Two coaches were found to earn higher salaries than their school principals, putting the schools at odds with certification standards of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. (It's likely both principals will be getting raises.)

Seven percent of all state coaches are either ineligible to teach or hold conditional or probationary teaching certificates.

Many parent-run booster clubs provide cash bonuses to coaches. The more successful coaches are rewarded with vacation trips and the keys to leased vehicles. These football booster clubs routinely operate as non-profits outside the jurisdictions of the schools, and at least one club was found to have run afoul of IRS guidelines.