Basketball coach describes hectic game change: ‘Thought this had to be a joke’
Long County girls basketball coach Stevie Harrison called his players’ parents Monday evening to remind them to have their daughters in bed early.
The players had to be at school by 5:30 a.m. Tuesday to catch a bus leaving on a seven-hour trip to Ridgeland, near the Tennessee border, where Harrison’s southeast Georgia team would play its first-round Class 3A game.
Later that evening, around 9:30 p.m., Harrison got a call from his athletic director. Long County’s opponent had changed.
“They told me we’ve got to go to Oconee County and play at 6,” Harrison said. “I thought ‘this has got to be a joke.’ There’s no way in the world. So I’ve got to call my parents back and make sure they aren’t asleep. Then I called Ridgeland at 10. And they had no idea.”
The Georgia High School Association changed up six Class 3A playoff games Monday night because of four unreported scores discovered from the regular season.
Only one was a girls game. Hephzibah, originally the No. 22 seed in the girls draw, had failed to report a loss. Another school notified the GHSA of the possible omission around 3:30 p.m. Monday.
Hephzibah went from the No. 22 seed to No. 24. Long County and North Hall each moved up a spot, sending Long County to Oconee County, North Hall to Troup and Hephzibah to Ridgeland.
The GHSA also investigated three unreported boys scores involving Upson-Lee and Westside of Augusta. Upson-Lee was dropped from the tournament, replaced by Cairo, now scheduled to play Cedar Grove. Westside and Pickens flip-flopped in the seeding, with Pickens going to No. 22, Westside to No. 23. Pickens is now playing at Jefferson, and Westside is playing at Heritage in Ringgold.
It took the GHSA a few hours to verify the scores were missing, update the rankings produced by the Post Season Rankings formula that picks and seeds the teams and then tell all 12 teams affected.
“It’s just one of those things that’s out of our control, so we’re trying to have a good perspective,” Pickens boys coach Carson Hollingsworth said. “Life throws situations at you. It’s a little bit crazy, but we’re making the best out of it.”
Hollingsworth said scouting a new opponent, Jefferson, on short notice was the most difficult thing.
“Instead of two days, we get one,” he said. “We’re trying to prepare as best we can. They (Jefferson) are in the same boat as we are. We can sit around and complain or pivot and make some changes. We know we going to have to battle either way.”
The three girls teams that got new opponents did get one break. They were allowed to postpone their games one day to Wednesday. The boys games were already scheduled for Wednesday.
“It was not a good day yesterday,” Long County’s Harrison said. “But I got over it. I gave myself about 30 minutes to be mad, but then the whole focus had to change because we have a new opportunity. So I spent today (Tuesday) reconfiguring plans. That’s fine. It’s part of the job.”
The reconfiguration included canceling hotel reservations near Ridgeland and a walk-through he had planned for his players in Adairsville. One player was staying with relatives in Marietta and planned to catch the bus as it made its way up I-75. Marietta is only 100 miles from Ridgeland but 250 from Ludowici, the school’s home base. The good news is that Oconee County is only 200 miles away, about a four-hour trip.
Pretournament draw changes are rare, according to Becky Taylor, founder of the Georgia High School Basketball Project. Taylor has researched results of every state tournament since the first one in 1922. She can recall only one pretournament change this century. That took place in 2012, when Wilcox County’s superintendent pulled his boys team out because of an off-campus incident that led to in-house player suspensions.
Mistakes causing reshuffles are more likely since the GHSA’s adoption of PSR, which requires that some 900 boys and girls basketball teams report all of their more than 10,000 game results accurately. Before the GHSA adopted it, playoff berths were decided by simple region finish.
In 2026-27, the GHSA will use PSR to seed all eight classifications rather than just four. With that on the horizon, Harrison and Hollingsworth agreed the GHSA needs to make efforts to ensure the last-minute bracket changes don’t happen.
“We shouldn’t be calling a team eight hours before they get on (a) bus to travel seven hours that we’re switching to go somewhere else,” Harrison said. “I understand nobody’s perfect, and people make mistakes, but there’s got to be a better way. But we tell the kids all time, ‘You got to figure it out and keep on going.’ That’s what we are trying to do ourselves now.”
GHSA executive director Tim Scott said Monday he considered calling forfeits for Upson-Lee, Westside and Hephzibah — the schools that failed to report scores as required.
Bylaws don’t call for those penalties, so Scott said the schools would be fined and that the GHSA’s executive committee this spring would consider tougher measures and call on more help from athletic directors and region secretaries to ensure that scores don’t go unreported.
“Just make people accountable,” Hollingsworth said. “Make sure everybody does their job and get the scores reported before it’s set in stone and people are making plans.”
About the Author
Todd Holcomb covers high school sports across the state. He rejoined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2025 and has worked with the AJC in varying capacities since 1985. He is a co-founder and editor of Georgia High School Football Daily.
