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Saturday, December 8, 2007
Finals in Dome even better
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
We locals have gotten accustomed to the Georgia Dome. We drive by it on the way to work. We go there on Sundays to watch the Falcons lose. To us, it’s just another big building. But to a teenage athlete, nothing beats the Dome as a destination.
Campbell Wilson is a sophomore linebacker for Lovett, one of the ritzy private schools off Paces Ferry. He knows the Dome well, having, he said, “grown up going to Falcons games.”
On Saturday he played against Cook in the Class AA semifinals on the same field where he’d once watched Michael Vick. Was there anything familiar about the experience? “This was like a whole new world,” Wilson said. “It’s the greatest feeling I’ve ever had.”
Let’s carry that a step further. Let’s say that the Lovett-Cook game wasn’t just one of 10 semis spread over two days but an honest-to-goodness championship game, the kind with both memories and a trophy at stake. Wouldn’t that be even better?
Tune in next December, when all five finals will be staged here. (Two on Friday, three on Saturday.) For Georgia high school football, it will mark a clear upgrade.
Having the semis at the Dome, as had been the case since 1994, was a nice notion with an inherent conceptual flaw. Why gather teams for the season’s next-to-last weekend only to spread them out again? Imagine if the NCAA men’s Final Four consisted of two semifinals, and then the winners adjourned to the higher seed’s campus to sort out the title. Would CBS be ballyhooing “The Road to San Antonio and Wherever Else”?
“If you go to a high school in August, you’ll probably find a sign that says, ‘We’re going to the Dome,’ ” said Steve Figueroa, the Georgia High School Association’s director of media relations. “But even if you get to the Dome, you’ve still got to go somewhere else to win a state championship.”
It’s a big thing for any school, having a championship decided at its stadium. Dexter Wood, formerly a title-winning coach and still the athletics director at Buford, recalls playing host to three finals. (And Buford, which beat Dublin on Saturday, will stage the Class AA final against Lovett.) “The atmosphere was incredible,” Wood said, “and that’s where I’m torn. But after all is said and done, coming to the Dome [for the semis] is mighty close to that. And when you combine the Dome and the state championship, that’s an idea worth trying.”
Some might complain that the Dome’s immensity renders it outsized for this event. The largest single-day semifinal crowd has been roughly 30,000 in a building that can accommodate 71,250. But the alternative to empty seats isn’t a palatable one. The Class A title game will be played at Wilcox County, where the stadium seats 2,600. Both Wilcox and fellow finalist Emanuel County Institute took 2,000 tickets home. If both sell out, that means 1,400 folks will be standing come Friday.
Better to have the 10 finalists gather here. Crowds would surely grow if the imprimatur of “state title” is applied, and perhaps some enterprising Atlanta business might find it sensible to become a primary sponsor of Championship Weekend. Marketing oomph, even for a consistently superior product like Georgia high school football, would always be welcome.
And there is, it must be said, an innocence and an energy about high school football that no other Dome event — from a Falcons game to the SEC championship to the Chick-fil-A Bowl — can match. The biggest play in Lovett’s victory Saturday was Wilson’s second-quarter interception of a fourth-down Cook pass. He took the ball and fled goalward, and as he neared the culmination of his 68-yard touchdown return he resisted the urge to track his progress on the end-zone matrix board.
“I did not look up,” Wilson said.
Why not?
“Because my coach [Mike Muschamp] told us he was TiVo-ing the game. And he said, ‘If I see anybody looking at the screen, you’re going to run in practice.’ “
Permalink | Comments (44) | Categories: High School, Mark Bradley
Gaines turns into ‘warrior’ to boost Dogs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Athens — No way Georgia’s depleted basketball team was supposed to spend Saturday afternoon at Stegeman Coliseum knocking the “Demon” and the “Deacons” out of Wake Forest. No way the Bulldogs were supposed to respond to all of their off-the-court issues with only a loss at stifling Wisconsin after seven games.
Then again, no way Sundiata Gaines would allow anything less. He is the Bulldogs’ Mr. Everything as their senior point guard. Mostly, he is the epitome of his name, which first belonged to Sundiata Keita, the 13th-century king of the Mali Empire in West Africa. To paraphrase, Sundiata means warrior.
“He was just a powerful leader who led his tribe through a lot of adversity,” said Gaines, after continuing his role as the Bulldogs’ 21st century Sundiata by pushing his frequently erratic but always energetic team to a 72-50 blowout of an ACC foe. It’s always the big things and the little things with Gaines. In addition to his game-high-tying 15 points, he led Georgia in rebounding (again) with nine, and he contributed five assists, two steals and zero turnovers in the second half.
We mention that turnover thing, because Gaines closed the first half with an uncharacteristic six. “I just came out too excited, and I was just trying to force a lot of things,” Gaines said. “In the second half, I realized that I had to calm down and be more relaxed. I was excited about the game, because we had a nice little crowd for the first time this year.”
What that noisy gathering of 7,800 saw was a group of Bulldogs failing to hold a pity party for themselves. They could, and they could start by whining over the Horrors of the Harricks that placed Georgia basketball in the NCAA slammer through much of this decade. There also was the program’s somber mood after the tragic death of Kevin Brophy through an automobile crash. Then came earlier this year, when several players decided that athletics director Damon Evans was just kidding or something when he enhanced the academic requirements and penalties for everybody on all Georgia teams.
Evans wasn’t kidding. Three Georgia basketball players were suspended a total of 30 games, and two eventually were kicked off the team. They were Mike Mercer and Takais Brown, the Bulldogs’ two leading scorers last season.
If that wasn’t enough, starting guard Billy Humphrey was arrested on a felony weapons charge after police searched the dorm room he shares with Mercer for marijuana. Even though Humphrey accepted a pretrial diversion program and rejoined the team, it still was more mess for a team that already was dealing with a lot of it.
It’s still early, of course, with pre-SEC games ahead for Georgia against Gonzaga and Georgia Tech after a Christmas tournament in Hawaii. Even so, those around the Bulldog Nation can rejoice over their 21st century Sundiata doing more than enough to help this bunch handle their messes for the moment.
Gaines has done so by example. It begins with his understanding that Evans wasn’t kidding. Not only that, Gaines wants to graduate on time with a degree in sociology, so he is taking 18 hours during each of his final two semesters. On a given day, he rises at 6:15 a.m., and then he goes to study hall, and then he goes to class, and then he goes to his tutoring session. “After that, we have practice, and after practice, I go back to another tutor, and that’s my day, which ends about 9 p.m., Monday through Friday,” Gaines said. “You want to set an example for everybody. It not only helps me out, but it helps my teammates out.”
In the meantime, the Bulldogs are helping themselves flirt with becoming the surprise team in the conference.
Added Gaines: “With the team we have now, we’re more focused. We’ve got better team chemistry. Nothing wrong with the guys that were here before, because they were great players, but now, guys are buying into what we’re doing on a daily basis, both offensively and defensively. Everybody’s playing hard, and we’re very unselfish.”
Especially Gaines, because warrior kings can do nothing less.
Permalink | Comments (31) | Categories: Terence Moore, UGA / SEC
