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

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

The investigative package brought a huge readership response, both from the daily publication and the newspaper's Internet site. Some 300 e-mail messages, phone calls and letters showed up in the newsroom. And the newspaper's Internet site - with a searchable database of all the football coaches' salaries and data-received an average of 1,300 hits an hour during the week of publication.

As a result of the AJC inquiry, the touchdown club at a suburban Atlanta high school - with an annual budget in excess of a quarter-million dollars and that raised $2.5 million for its new football complex - retained an attorney and accountant to get the organization in compliance with state and federal tax laws. The Secretary of State previously dissolved the nonprofit organization for failing to file annual reports and the AJC found the touchdown club hadn't filed tax returns with the IRS for at least three years.

The package also alerted the IRS to the many taxable perks afforded some coaches - from cash bonuses to vehicles to vacation trips.

Stumbling blocks

Gathering salary and teaching assignment information from all 312 public high schools proved to be a daily battle. Initially, some districts refused to comply or said it would cost hundreds of dollars for them to produce the information. We gathered information right until the last hour. A lot of data were returned incomplete - either they didn't list a coach's name, omitted their teaching responsibilities or failed to differentiate football earnings from base teaching salary. We constantly faxed and mailed requests to the districts. Finally, we shipped our data to the individual school districts and had them sign off on the accuracy of what we planned to publish regarding their coaches.

The booster or touchdown clubs posed a different problem because they are set up outside the school as private nonprofits. We got a grasp on budgets and annual income from reviewing IRS Form 990 tax records. But in almost all cases, it came down to piecing together information from a variety of current and past club officers, coaches and athletic directors.

In the end, trying to get a reaction from educators and public officials proved a surprisingly daunting chore. Outgoing Gov. Zell Miller, who championed education and promoted the state lottery to fund the state Hope Scholarship Program, said it was too hot a subject to tackle in his last days. Lt. Gov. Pierre Howard didn't respond to interview requests. And Linda Schrenko, head of the state Education Department, turned down repeated interview requests on the subject, including a final personal visit to her office two days before the articles were published.

Tios for next time

Next time, we'd allow more lead-time to gather and obtain the relevant documents and records requests. It requires a great deal of diligent follow-up to get a 100 percent response when requesting information from 312 schools. We were able to publish the entire database of 2,400-plus coaches on the Internet so the public could perform its own searches.