Macon's Big Four - FPD, Mount de Sales, Stratford, Tattnall - leaving GHSA for new GISA-connected venture

By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

          The conversations have been going for more than a year, mostly conversations of wishful thinking, starting mostly when the GHSA voted to split Class A schools during the year into public and private regions to match the split utilized during the playoffs.

          Then dissatisfaction grew among the smaller private schools in the GHSA when the association added a service area, a school zone, for private schools, a move that was expected to be discussed with private schools but wasn’t.

          The quiet-to-the-public hiring of Tommy Marshall - the longtime athletics director at Marist and part of the GHSA executive committee - to the newly-created and part-time position of GISA commissioner in February was the first real shot fired in the movement to find an alternative to the GHSA.

The biggest shot came Wednesday morning with an announcement from Stratford making it official: Stratford, Tattnall, Mount de Sales, FPD, Deerfield-Windsor, and Strong Rock Christian – currently Region 1-A Private in the GHSA –would be leaving the GHSA at the end of the 2021-22 year.

          A general release from FPD signed by the six heads of school and tweet from Tattnall followed, the news coming a day after the GHSA announced how the enrollment numbers broke down for the seven classifications. Nothing in those numbers changed anything for the schools and their regions.

          But again, being - as Stratford athletics director Mark Farriba has said in multiple conversations with The Central Georgia Sports Report - segregated into just private schools only rendered the private schools’ membership in the GHSA fairly moot.

          As Farriba summarized, the schools left the GHSA, and then found themselves in a version of the GISA within the GHSA.

          “The GHSA we joined in 2014, this isn’t the same GHSA,” he said recently.

          Plenty has yet to be decided and formed with the new league, including the name. It will not be called the GISA, and every part of it is an early work in progress.

          From quietly moving up the start of the soccer season to the regular changing of parameters for private schools during reclassification to the, as Farriba has said, segregation of Class A in the GHSA to public regions and private regions, the attractiveness of the GHSA and the basic reasons Macon’s Big Four private schools – as well as many others in the past decade – moved have all but disappeared.

          Meetings have been held for about two years, picking up frequency with the addition of Marshall to the equation. Farriba said the collection of schools formed an ad hoc committee for smaller privates schools a few years ago, and the GHSA soon sanctioned the group officially.

          “But really, the committee, it’s not been able to get anything, any measurable help,” Farriba said.

          Last February, the GISA was to absorb the Georgia Association of Private and Parochial Schools. That announcement was made to schools in a meeting on the same night the GISA introduced Marshall as the commissioner. The Central Georgia Sports Report was the first - and for several days, only - to report both moves, which weren’t publicized by either organization.

          Within weeks, though, the never-announced merger was dissolved. Soon after, GAPPS president and former Tattnall girls basketball head coach and athletics director Todd Whetsel had taken a position with the GISA.

          As of Wednesday, though, neither Marshall nor Whetsel appear on the staff list of the GISA on its contact list, which shows staff of six.

          Nevertheless, the Marshall hiring and at least the attempt of a merger – which wouldn’t have strengthened Class AAA in the GISA but helped the smaller schools – is when Class A private schools started seeing the possibility of something coming together.

          “The hiring of Tommy was, in our opinion, a significant deal,” Farriba said. “Our thing was that we had told them that we had really felt there needed to be a commissioner that was very well respected within the Georgia High School Association, and somebody we felt like that if schools did want to make a move would have confidence, would just feel good about.”

          Meetings were held throughout the state with GHSA, GISA, and GAPPS members. Worth noting is that many schools are members of more than one of the aforementioned organizations based on extracurricular offerings.

          Momentum grew when the GHSA last summer changed the service area for private schools, an impending topic that the schools didn’t think was going to be decided on at that time, over the summer.

          “There was no conversation,” Farriba said. “Nobody told us they were considering that. Nothing.”

          In late September, St. Anne Pacelli in Columbus and then Tattnall put in writing to the GISA their non-binding intent to leave the GHSA for a to-be-formed GISA-connected athletics association.

          And the ball was rolling.

          Tattnall athletics director Joey Hiller confirmed its letter to the GISA in a Sept. 22 conversation.

          “Tattnall Square Academy is committed to putting itself with likeminded schools, that is the best possible situation for its students,” he said. “We are committed to making a move to a new league.

          “I will never use the word ‘going back to the GISA.’ That's saying we couldn't cut it in the GHSA, and we all know that's not true.”

          At that point, general details were few, and Hiller said nothing was a done deal, for Tattnall or the other local schools.

          “I know how this AD and this AD and this AD think,” said Hiller, also Tattnall’s head baseball and softball coach. “I don't know if the head of school feels the same way. I don't know if the board feels the same way.

          “I can tell you that there are a lot of GHSA Single A privates that are not real happy with what's going on in the GHSA right now. You'll see in time that there's going to be the forming of a new league. We are committed to that, because we think it would be in the best interest of our students.”

          A major point of debate in the latest reclassification process, which happens every two years for two years, involved the latest plan to address some private schools – mostly in bigger classifications – have inordinate success, even when they moved up into a larger classification.

          The GHSA has used assorted equations to address the fact that private schools – and certain “city” and “open enrollment” schools - don’t have attendance zone to adhere to, while public schools do.

          The latest is a 3.0 multiplier, meaning out of zone students will be counted three times, once in the initial full-time enrollment figure and twice after that.

          In the GHSA’s reclassification meeting on Oct. 3, only a few members of the committee debated it, and there was little discussion when it passed the full executive committee vote a day later.

          Nothing in the 3.0 multiplier was to affect Class A schools, public or private. Class A schools can’t be pushed up a class based on the multiplier and number used for reclassification.

          Hiller and Farriba both mentioned that, and wondered why Class A was involved when no Class A schools would be moved up.

          GHSA Class A enrollment for football-playing schools ranges from 131 at Central-Talbotton to 580 for Holy Innocents’ which has a multiplier enrollment of 1,384.

          Local enrollments: Mount de Sales, 342; FPD, 305; Stratford 271; and Tattnall, 208.

          FPD was the first of the Central Georgia private schools to make the move from the GISA to GHSA, and the Vikings’ first year of GHSA competition was 2010-11.

          Mount de Sales announced in January of 2013 that it was ready to make the move, followed about two months later by Stratford and Tattnall. They began GHSA competition in 2014-15.

          That left John Milledge, Westfield, Trinity Christian, Brentwood, Gatewood, Piedmont, Windsor, Twiggs Academy as the Central Georgia teams in the GISA at the time. Windsor and Twiggs left for the then-GICAA (Georgia Independent Christian Athletic Association), now GAPPS (Georgia Association of Private and Parochial Schools).

          Fullington left the GAPPS for the GISA starting this year, as did a number of programs throughout the state.

          The decision involves more than just athletics, and a feeling that private schools were also basically left out of decisions and plans in other extracurricular activities.

          Athletically, there will be a drop in competition for the schools moving, especially until more schools make the move.

          Farriba said the hope is for every private school to move, and he doesn’t know how many will do so in time for 2022-23 regions and schedules. But after that first year, he hopes more schools will see what’s developed.

          He wasn’t sure if the GHSA had been officially notified by anybody of the schools’ decision, and was specific to note that, at least in his mind, the unhappiness with the GHSA was more about the association’s membership and committees and not the main office in Thomaston.

          “I want to make it clear,” said Farriba, a member of the GHSA’s executive committee. “I’m not talking about the office, the GHSA office. The GHSA office has been nothing but helpful and professional and accommodating to us. A lot of it has to do with the general population of the GHSA constituents.”

          The GISA currently has only 28 football-playing schools in Class AAA and AA. Class A doesn’t exist, but the GISA holds a Class A state championship for sports with AA schools declaring at the start of a season which class they want to compete in for the playoffs.

          The GAPPS has more 8-man teams than 11-man teams.

          More GAPPS schools are likely to start making a move, but the GISA’s new venture won’t be substantially strengthened until more schools like Macon’s Big Four do the same, which Farriba expects to happen at some point, if not for next year, soon after that.

          He said the decision to make the announcement came Tuesday morning.

          “I'm excited because we've been working on it for so long,” he said. “I'm looking forward to creating a new league, a new thing. It's something you have a chance to kind of call your own a little bit.

          “We have the opportunity to create. i think that's a beautiful thing.