New alignment means long trips for Grace
Now that the TSSAA has reclassified the sports programs for its member schools starting this school year, Grace Academy’s football team may want to look into having a gasoline pump installed on campus.
The Golden Eagles have been placed in the newly formed Division II-A East Region, with no other Chattanooga-area teams in there with them.
The first of Grace’s five regular-season road games is a trip downtown to Finley Stadium for its Aug. 25 nonregion season opener against Sale Creek. The others are league games, beginning with a Sept. 15 trip up Interstate 75 North to Knoxville to play Concord Christian.
According to calculations by mapquest.com, Grace and Concord are 85.9 miles apart. And that’s the Golden Eagles’ closest new region opponent.
Three of their last four games on this year’s schedule are Oct. 6 at The King’s Academy in Seymour, Oct. 13 at Donelson Christian Academy in Nashville and Oct. 27 in the season finale at Middle Tennessee Christian in Murfreesboro. Those are round trips of 230, 290 and 230 miles.
“We had to look at our nonregion games and try to schedule some teams where we could get some decent gates,” said Grace coach Bob Ateca, who was able to schedule neighboring rivals Silverdale Baptist Academy and Boyd-Buchanan from DII-AA East for home games, in addition to the game against Sale Creek. “We don’t fundraise. Being a private school, parents are already paying thousands of dollars for their children to go there. We don’t want to ask them for X number of dollars on top of that just to be able cover some of our expenses. We’ll try this year making money from our gate and our concession stand. Then we’ll adjust as we need to.”
Grace at least has had some experience in dealing with considerable travel the past few seasons. Belonging to a five-team region, it had to fill its schedule with six nonregion games. Often those games were against teams in the Knoxville and Nashville areas.
Ateca said a typical game day in that situation means leaving the school on a bus around 3 p.m. The team stops for a pregame meal somewhere near the halfway point of the trip and then holds a prearranged walk-through at a nearby college or high school. Ateca said that helps to break up the trip.
Given that the Golden Eagles are now in an eight-team league, seven opponents are built into their schedule. Next year instead of four region road trips, they’ll scale back to three. But those trips will be to Ezell-Harding in Antioch (270 miles round trip), Mount Juliet Christian (296) and Friendship Christian in Lebanon (300).
“As far as going back public, they’ve pretty much closed every avenue on us doing that,” Ateca said of the state governing body. “We’re kind of hemmed in. It looks like it’s going to be sink or swim for us where we are.”
Contact Kelley Smiddie at ksmiddie@ timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6653. Follow him on Twitter @KelleySmiddie.