Is Valdosta just like Camden

Valdosta's excellence comes with price tag
Georgia high school football program sets bar high to live up to ‘Winnersville, USA'

By Steve WiebergUSA TODAY

VALDOSTA, Ga. — The Friday night lights shine a little brighter here.
Literally.

High above the new Sprinturf playing surface and armchair seating for its season ticketholders — and beyond the new locker rooms, press box and football museum that also came with the $7.5 million renovation of Cleveland Field at Bazemore-Hyder Stadium — Valdosta High School installed the same high-performance lights used a couple of hundred miles to the south at Daytona International Speedway.
They spotlight a high school football program that, even among the nation's elite, stands out. Valdosta has won a national-record 816 games in 92 years, giving the south Georgia city of 45,000 its identity as “Winnersville, USA.”
So cherished are season tickets that they're handed down in wills and parceled out in divorce settlements, and so hopeful are fathers of siring future Wildcats that they've toted newborn sons from the hospital in cat-pawed Valdosta helmets.
Feeding this football juggernaut is a more than $300,000 budget that dwarfs those for nearly all of the nation's top high school programs, as determined by 22 years of USA TODAY rankings. If Valdosta plays deep into the playoffs, its spending balloons past $400,000.
The Wildcats' 1,500-member booster organization, the Touchdown Club, kicks in another $85,000-$90,000 a year, says former president and longtime board member David Waller. The club outfits coach Rick Darlington in a four-wheel-drive pickup and underwrote a recent $100,000 overhaul of the weight room.
Total annual investment in football: close to a half-million dollars.
“There's really nothing about this place that's common,” says Darlington, hired from Apopka, Fla., after a national search and six games into his second season at Valdosta. “I've heard us called the Yankees of high school football.”
Indeed, “Valdosta has kind of set the bar,” says Charles Turner, president of the Georgia Athletic Directors Association and recently retired as AD at Athens' Cedar Shoals High. “Hey, they've been nationally ranked and had great teams for years. Everybody else, I think, is trying to catch up to them.”
Expensive as it may be.
Valdosta takes the “Winnersville” nickname, adopted in the early 1970s, to heart. Its teams have won 23 state championships and claimed six mythical national titles since 1940, and the Wildcats are a composite No. 2 in final USA TODAY rankings since 1982 (they finished No. 1 in 1984 and '86). In Darlington's first season, they rose from a 1-3 start to Georgia's Class AAAAA championship game, falling there to Camden County.
They're rebuilding this year, starting just one senior on the offensive line and a freshman, Michael Turner, at quarterback for the first time since future University of Georgia captain Buck Belue stepped into the lineup in 1974. Valdosta takes a 3-3 record into Friday's Winnersville Classic showdown with crosstown Lowndes County.
To put the school's financial commitment to football in perspective, consider what neighboring Valdosta State spends on a college program that made last year's NCAA Division II playoffs and is ranked 10th in the nation this season.
The Blazers' total is more than $900,000, athletics director Herb Reinhard says. But remove coaches' salaries, which aren't part of the high school's football budget, and scholarship and recruiting expenses, and their operating outlay is a little more than $320,000. Or about 25% less than the $419,291 that Valdosta High spent in 2003.
Attendance for Valdosta State home games averaged 6,744 last year and dipped to 4,295 in two games this season. The Wildcats' high school games averaged about 7,500 a year ago and 7,364 through five games this season.
Darlington shakes his head. “This whole deal,” he says, “is more like a college situation than a high school” one.
He has his own Thursday evening television show, available across south Georgia and northern Florida via the local UPN affiliate during the season. Arriving from Apopka in central Florida in February 2003, Darlington brought three of his assistants, and “I could have brought as many as I wanted,” he says. “I could have brought my whole staff.”
Like the major programs in college and some others at the high school level, Valdosta pads its home schedule by paying opponents to come to Cleveland Field — three last season, four this season, at $8,000 a pop — and still turns a $30,000 profit a game.
There's Darlington's $36,000 Dodge Ram pickup, with hemi, courtesy of the Touchdown Club. Registration and insurance thrown in.
There's more than $7,000 in bonuses from the booster club spread among Darlington's assistants, varsity down through middle school.
There's last year's renovation of the weight room, yet another booster project. And a new sales tax-funded, $800,000 indoor facility on the way.
There's even an informal arrangement with Nike under which the school buys shoes and other gear and Nike kicks in some free shoes and shirts and pants for the coaches. Reebok tried to match the terms but couldn't, says Terry Daniel, who oversees the school's athletics budgets.
“I mean, what are we lacking?” Darlington says from his cramped, cinder-block-walled office, one of the program's few unremarkable facilities. “We've got great tradition. We've got a great stadium. We've got great coaches. We've got great equipment. We're very blessed. I've been on the other end of it. I've been at a place where if I needed a chin strap I had to go raise the money.”
With such community passion and financial investment come serious expectations. Valdosta fired Darlington's predecessor, Mike O'Brien, despite a 70-20-1 record and 1998 state championship in seven years. The Wildcats were 8-3-1 and lost in overtime in the second round of the playoffs in 2002, his final season.
Valdosta City Schools superintendent Sam Allen says, “Sometimes, the public perception is, ‘You're putting all your resources and all your energy toward athletics.' ” Phoned and e-mailed complaints about football's largesse crop up regularly, and anonymously, in a “Rant & Rave” column on the opinion page of The Valdosta Daily Times.
Darlington, who also is the school's athletics director, doesn't teach a class. While he's paid $87,500 a year, average teacher pay in the Valdosta City Schools system ranks among the bottom third in the state, according to the most recently available Georgia Public Education Report Card. It was $41,923 in 2001-02, coming in 120th among 180 school systems in the state.
The average administrators' pay in Valdosta was $67,064, ranking 145th.
Yet football costs the school district nothing. Revenue from the sport last year was just a little less than $469,000, most in gate receipts. The profit was $49,619, which helps offset a deficit of almost $70,000 run up by the school's 15 other varsity sports.
The stadium face lift was financed by a special 1% sales tax earmarked for capital improvements in education. The Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax is split with the Lowndes County school district and generates about $644,000 a month for Valdosta's schools alone.
That money is spread well beyond Valdosta athletics. Almost $5 million went into the 750-seat fine arts center, more than $6 million into the replacement of an elementary school.
Allen, in his seventh year as superintendent, says he went to the same pains and relative expense ($70,000-plus salary) to hire a new fine arts director as he did to bring in Darlington.
“I can say,” says Ingrid Hall, Valdosta High's assistant principal for curriculum and instruction, “that since I've been here, there has been a consciousness to find a balance (between athletics and academics). I don't see where we compromise.”
The issue is more than one school's capacity to wade into such deep financial waters, however. There's the ripple effect — the pressure placed on competing schools to wade in, as well.
Major colleges have a less-than-affectionate nickname for the cascade in athletics spending: the “arms race.”
“It puts athletes whose schools can't reach as far in a position where they don't have access to some of those things,” says Ralph Swearngin, executive director of the Georgia High School Association. “What we are trying to communicate to our superintendents and principals is that we've got to keep a semblance of order. We've got to make sure the tail doesn't wag the dog.”
Dennis Payne, the association's administrator for football, traveled the state for 30 years as a game official. He worked a Friday night or two in Valdosta, taking in the spectacle and span of the Wildcats program.
With that, he says, comes some understanding of Valdosta's inclination to spend for excellence.
“When people move to Georgia,” he says, “they look at where they'd like their kids to go to school and those kinds of things pop up. ‘Since I'm coming into this state and my son's going to play football, I want him to play for Valdosta.' So they'll move to Valdosta.”



How many famous Valdosta Football Players Can You Name?
None.
I guess they spend millions a year for a good reason.

Maybe if they cared as much about education as they do football we wouldn't have so many stupid people in this world.

Notice I said as much not any more.

I just want to bring education up equal with football, Because I love football as much as any other person, but it should not be put in front of education.