By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

With its 35th birthday coming up this summer, the Georgia Independent School Association is amid some moving and shaking.

Both happened Thursday night when Tommy Marshall was introduced as interscholastic commissioner. That was the first part of an early-evening GISA meeting at Stratford of school board members, heads of schools, and athletics directors at Stratford.

The part about the meeting being “to gather for dialogue about the future of independing school athletics”? A bigger bomb: The GISA has acquired the Georgia Association of Private & Parochial Schools.

The GISA’s release, not posted on its website or social media as of 10 p.m. Thursday but obtained by The Central Georgia Sports Report, simply stated: “Georgia Independent School Association (GISA) is pleased to announce that a definitive agreement has been reached whereby GISA will acquire Georgia Association of Private & Parochial Schools (GAPPS).

“We look forward to closing the deal and moving forward, providing quality services for all schools under the GISA umbrella.”

Such a merger has been discussed for several years for a variety of reasons, but there were differences.

Homeschooling had been considered an issue. There is a strong home-school aspect to GAPPS, and that aspect is now part of the GHSA. After years of voting to keep homeschoolers from competing, the GHSA has backed a state bill allowing homeschool students in grades 6-12 to participate in extracurricular activities at the school in whose zone they reside, as long as they take at least one oneline course offered by that system.

It likely remains something of an issue in the combined association, since private schools technically don’t have any attendance zones that public school systems do.

The GISA has been hit hard the past decade by schools leaving for the GHSA, including four Macon private schools: FPD, Stratford, Mount de Sales, and Tattnall. This is Deerfield-Windsor’s first year in the GHSA.

There are only eight full-time GISA schools in Central Georgia: Brentwood, Gatewood, John Milledge, Piedmont, Trinity Christian, Twiggs Academy, Westfield, and Windsor.

The four private Macon GHSA schools are among those on the association’s master list of members. Other notable GHSA programs like Marist, Athens Academy, Pace, Prince Avenue Christian, and Eagle’s Landing Christian are also dual members.

GAPPS is the full-time home for Central Georgia schools Central Georgia Arts & Athletics, Central Fellowship, Covenant, Fullington, and John Hancock, and Milledgeville Prep.

GAPPS – former known as the Georgia Independent Christian Athletic Association - also has associate membership that includes GHSA schools. The website lists 126 schools, including associate-type members like FPD and Trinity Christian-Sharpsburg.

Todd Whetsel left his job as head girls basketball coach at Tattnall to take over the then-GICAA after the 2018-19 year as president. He was at Thursday’s meeting and is expected to be part of the expanded administration.

The GISA website lists a total of 160 members, including associates. But it also listed only 26 schools in six football regions covering two classifications, and 56 basketball-playing schools. Only 17 wrestling programs in one overall classification competed last season.

A topic in the past few years has also dealt with speculation that one, some, or all of the of the Macon private schools were considering returning to the GISA, but that was pretty much just speculation, although there has been unhappiness with the GHSA further separating private schools and public schools, especially in Class A, home to the four locals and most of the GHSA’s private schools.

The public-private school divide grew substantially almost a decade ago when a movement began to separate the public and private schools competitively, citing a number of advantages private schools had. There was talk of small public schools breaking away from the GHSA.

It led to the GHSA dividing the Class A postseason in 2012 into public and private, starting with the 2012-13 year.

Then the GHSA in the spring of 2019 voted completely split the two groups in Class A in regions, public-only and private-only. That added to the speculation about teams leaving, because of small regions and likely increased travel. This is the first year of that alignment, and everything involved with COVID-19 has led to it being difficult to gauge the positives and negatives.

It further pushed the private schools into their own group. Thus, major reasons for leaving the GISA for the GHSA became increasingly moot.

“The GHSA has basically created an independent school league within the GHSA in Single A,” said one local athletics administrator before the big news came out, and one who would for most reasons prefer to stay in a GHSA that didn’t separate the two groups. “So if they’ve created an independent school league within the GHSA, why are we still in the GHSA?”

There haven’t been any real options, and it’s way too early to gauge the impact of Thursday’s move on the potential of GHSA defections. The number of schools returning to the GISA would have to be substantial, much more than just the local contingent.

“I think the whole vision right now is they’re wanting all independent schools under one umbrella,” said one athletics director in attendance who asked not to be identified. “No matter the (association).”

GAPPS schools won’t have a big impact in football for awhile, but should be competitive in other sports quicker.

“Everybody was glad, because obviously the more schools in the association, the better,” the GISA AD said. “Even if they’re smaller schools. It is still going to help the overall league.”

The addition of Marshall is a major boost toward strengthening the association – current and future - and perhaps address those aforementioned issues, “the segregation” of private schools and public schools in the association in Class A.

Marshall brings a major GHSA resume to the collection of private schools, including currently being a member of the GHSA’s executive committee. He is retiring as athletics director of Marist, a position he has held since 1996 after nearly two decades of coaching in high school and college.

His coaching career began in 1977 at Redan as defensive coordinator, two years before the team won a state title. He was head coach at Walton from 1980-84 and went 35-20 at the Class 4A GHSA school.

Marshall then jumped to the college level, coaching at Mars Hill and then his alma mater Furman, where he was a defensive lineman in the mid-1970s. He served on the same staff for a few years as former Mercer head coach Bobby Lamb, who played at Furman in the 1980s and then coached there.

He moved into athletics administration at Furman, and left a few years later for Marist.

The Marist athletics program was ranked nationally by Sports Illustrated and won scores of Georgia Athletic Directors Association Directors Cup awards as the top program in its classification.

Marshall, the married father of two and grandfather to five, has won many region and state athletics director awards, as well as some national honors. He is a member of the state’s athletics directors’ Hall of Fame