Denied appeal for Class A, Gordon Lee opts for jump to Class AAA

After more than two months of seeing itself go from Class A up to Class AA and unsuccessfully appealing to stay in Class A, Gordon Lee will have a new home when the 202223 school year begins this fall — Region 6-AAA.

One final appeal by the school to remain in Class A was denied by the Georgia High School Association’s Executive Committee in Thomaston last Monday, but that governing board ultimately approved a back-up request from the school to bump up all the way to Class AAA.

Gordon Lee principal Michael Langston said after that after hearing from different Reclassification Committee members during a previous appeal, that Gordon Lee’s statewide athletic successes across the board, including recent repeat state championships in several sports and its recent finishes in the GADA Director’s Cup standings, was a main factor in the school’s appeal to drop back to Class A being denied.

According to minutes from the meeting, Chickamauga City School Superintendent Melody Day spoke on behalf of the school in their appeal to move back to Class A. However, after that appeal was denied, the school requested to be allowed to move up to Class AAA, which was unanimously approved.

With the Executive Committee concluding Monday’s meeting by ratifying the new region alignments, 6-AAA will consist of Gordon Lee, LaFayette, LFO, Ridgeland and Ringgold, along with Adairsville, Bremen and Coahulla Creek, for an eight-team region when fall sports begin in August.

This will mark the first time in history that Gordon Lee will be classified as a Class AAA school.

“There are going to be some

natural rivalries (in Region 6-AAA),” Langston explained. “We compete with several of those in middle school already and this will give our fans a chance to travel more to see us.”

The GHSA voted on Nov. 1 to go from a 2.0 multiplier to a 3.0 multiplier, which was applied to students who attended a GHSA member

school, but were not from the district where they were geographically zoned.

The multiplier increase was put in play to combat what many public schools around the state felt were unfair advantages by city schools and larger private schools, which led to those schools, especially the larger private schools, winning a bigger percentage of recent state championships.

Each of the member schools of the GHSA had the multiplier applied to their enrollment numbers, except for Class A schools, whom the GHSA had made exempt as that classification had already separated public and private schools for most all sports.

Schools were placed into their new classifications for the upcoming two-year cycle and, after appeals were heard to play up or down into different classifications, the Reclassification Committee set the new regions for all of its member schools on Nov. 10. That process also allowed for schools to appeal for lateral transfers to different regions inside their new classifications the following week.

However, in the week leading up to the appeals, nearly a dozen Class A private schools, reportedly upset by some of the new rules handed down to private schools from the GHSA, announced their decisions to leave the organization all together and move to the all-private GISA.

Facing an issue of not having enough Class A private schools for viable regions and playoffs in several sports, the GHSA formed a Class A Committee to come up with a new reclassification plan for the GHSA’s smallest schools.

That Nov. 30 committee meeting led to a proposal to apply the new 3.0 multiplier to all Class A private schools. Then, after some of the private schools were moved up, the remainder of Class A was divided between large schools (Division 1) and small schools (Division 2) based on adjusted enrollment numbers instead of the public-private split which had been in play for the past several years.

That proposal had put Gordon Lee in Division 1 of Class A, but the following day (Dec. 1), the Reclassification Committee reversed course, saying that while the Class A Committee had fixed the problems within Class A, those same problems had been shifted to Classes AA and AAA as many of the athletically-successful private schools would be bumped up into those classifications.

Looking for a more fair plan with more competitive balance, the Reclassification Committee made the decision to apply the 3.0 multiplier to all schools in the GHSA, regardless of classification. That decision then moved several schools up from Class A Division 1 into Class AA, including Gordon Lee and fellow Class A city school Trion.

After appeals were heard on Dec. 8, the schools were placed into their new regions. While Trion won its appeal to move back down to Class A Division 1, Gordon Lee’s appeal was denied by a 15-4 vote, leaving the Chickamauga city school in a newly-formed Region 7-AA that also was set to include Fannin County, Gordon Central, Haralson County, Model, Murray County, North Murray and Rockmart.

Gordon Lee did not appeal for a lateral transfer when the Reclassification Committee met again a week later. However, it was one of nine schools around the state granted an appeal before the larger Executive Committee last Monday in the hopes of moving to a different classification.

Only Drew Charter School (Class A to Class AA) and Schley County (Class A Div. 1 to Class A Div. 2) won their appeals.

“In Region 7-AA, the closest school to us was going to be at least an hour away,” Langston added. “Everybody thinks about football, but football is only a couple of Friday nights (away from home) that you have to deal with. We’re also talking about volleyball, softball, baseball, wrestling and everything else that you have to get out of school for. I’m as athleticminded as anybody, but at the end of the day, our kids need to be in school. That’s in their best interest.

“And when you start talking about kids being out of school, you’re also talking about the cost to get transportation and we don’t have bus routes. Our coaches are expected to teach all day, drive the bus an hour-and-a-half or two hours away, coach games, and then drive back.”

Langston said the move to Class AAA would result in less travel time, less time away from school and better opportunities for parents and fans to see more games.

“Even with Bremen being about 100 miles away, the average one-way distance for us in Region 6-AAA will be 33 miles,” he said. “In that Class AA region we had been put into, the average one-way distance for us would have been a little more than double that. Plus, schools like Rockmart, Haralson County and Fannin County, for example, aren’t going to bring a whole lot of people to games (to Chickamauga) on a Tuesday night.”

The new classification cycle will be in effect for the 202223 and 2023-24 school years.

NOTES

Gordon Lee had played in both Class C and Class B before becoming a GHSA Class A school in 1958. They spent four years in Class A before dropping back down to Class B, where they remained from 1962 to 1977.

They were reclassified as a Class A school again in 1978 after the GHSA did away with Class B at the end of the 197778 school year and six years after they had done away with the Class C designation.

Gordon Lee remained in Class A through the end of the 2013-14 school year when they were reclassified as Class AA during the 2014-2016 cycle. They were dropped back down to Class A the following cycle.