Title-winning Tift County coach leaves

Boys basketball’s Holland hired as Rome’s principal.

Eric Holland, the boys basketball coach who led Tift County to the Class AAAAAAA championship this season, was named principal at Rome High School at a school board meeting this week and will step away from coaching.

Holland had been Tift County’s coach since 2009 and won two state titles, the first in 2014. Tift County is the only South Georgia school to win a boys basketball title in the highest classification since Savannah in 1998.

Holland rebuilt Tift County into a state power with allstate players Tadric Jackson, Brannen Greene and P.J. Horne. Jackson and Greene were all-classification players of the year. Horne was a four-year starter, a member of both state championship teams and a first-team all-state pick this season.

Holland will join a high school that opened in 1992 and won its first state championship in any sport last fall. The football team, coached by former Tift County football coach John Reid, won Class AAAAA.

No replacement for Holland has been named, but the opening will be attractive.

“It’s one of the best jobs in the state because you aren’t in competition with anybody,” Holland said in March. “There’s no rival school across the street. The school board and superintendent and athletic director give us the resources we need.” GHSA doubles size of swim meet: The Georgia High School Association expanded the state swimming meet to four state championships from two this week at its executive committee meeting in Macon. The swim meet previously was contested in two combined groups of classes (6A7A and 1A-5A). Beginning next academic year, state champions will be crowned in both classes 7A and 6A, plus combined classes 4A-5A and 1A-3A. That was the most significant format change to a sport at the meeting, which is the GHSA’s last of 2016-17 academic year. Changes in coin tosses,

spring games: The GHSA made only a couple of changes to football this week, but both are significant to coaches. The association now will require that all games interrupted by weather be completed at a later date unless the team trailing concedes.

This past season, several games interrupted by storms before halftime were abandoned and ruled no contests while others that had reached only halftime were awarded to the team ahead. Also, spring football games, which will be new this academic year, can be expanded next year to three-team jamborees.

Making things more convenient for all sports, the GHSA voted to conduct coin tosses to pre-determine home teams in the state playoffs when both teams have the same seed.

Under the current rule, two region champions or same-seeded teams are required to have team representatives meet and flip a coin, often very shortly after their contests are completed. Beginning in 201718, the awarding of home field will be decided ahead of time by the GHSA.