GHSA’s new football coordinator names his two biggest fears
Today’s Four Questions interviewee is GHSA associate director and football supervisor Jasper Jewell, who has been on the job since April. Jewell retired from a 30-year career in education in 2023. He had been athletic director for Atlanta Public Schools for 14 years and is a former head football coach at Stone Mountain and Miller Grove. Jewell is a member of the Georgia Athletic Directors Association Hall of Fame.
1. What are the things that you do in your role as GHSA football coordinator?
“Once the game schedules are completed March 1 for the upcoming year, I start the process of assigning officials associations to the home teams. I also meet with the officials and go over rules and regulations that have changed or come down from the National Federation. The officials go through our officials camps. There are about seven across the state. We just completed our last camp last week at Starr’s Mill High School.
“Then if football coaches contact me about a problem, I’ll provide guidance. One of the biggest times of the year is during the summer months with the heat and humidity. I send letters to the principals, district athletic directors, school athletic directors and the head coaches, making sure they know the heat and humidity rules and have their wet bulbs and trainers on site to deal with those situations. We have to make sure kids are acclimated to the heat and ensure their safety.
“It’s a full-scale job that keeps me busy, and most especially on Monday mornings, when I have officials reports (from all the football games) from the weekend. I go through and see which ones need to be assessed and which ones need warning letters or fines.”
2. What are the most difficult problems you have to deal with, or what is your biggest fear?
“I have two big fears. One is the fear of having a catastrophic weather event. We pray to the good lord we don’t get caught with something like a hurricane because it throws off the schedule tremendously. We have more than 400 schools, and we have to look at rescheduling so many games when we have catastrophic weather. Two is the overall shortage of officials. It’s a nationwide shortage. While we understand it’s our job to make sure officials are doing everything they can to call games fairly and justly, at the same time we have to be considerate and work with our officials because there is a shortage.”
Note: As contractors, football officials choose the dates they are available to work. With the shortage, football associations sometimes do not have enough officials to cover all their assigned Friday games. To solve the problem, some Friday games are occasionally moved to Thursdays or Saturdays.
3. What is the most common call that you get?
“A lot of times, individuals call in trying to contest a fine or a suspension. Any suspension given by officials is not appealable under our constitution, but people try to call in to contest suspensions and fines, saying it was unnecessary or too egregious. But we give them fines and suspensions based on what’s in the bylaws. We have a fine structure based on first offense, second offense, third offense. We don’t deliberate that. We just follow the bylaws.”
4. What’s the toughest part of your job or maybe an aspect that you didn’t anticipate as being so difficult?
“Probably the fact that there are a lot of individuals that don’t understand that the GHSA doesn’t make the rules. The schools make the rules through committees. We enforce the rules. I can’t tell you how many times we get phone calls from parents who are angry, or we see social media posts, and they don’t understand this. How the PSR (the Post Season Rankings model that chooses and seeds playoff teams) came about or any transfer rules have been enacted by the schools. One of the hot tickets is reclassification. People think the GHSA, meaning the employees, choose to put schools in the regions or classifications and that it’s not fair. But we (the GHSA) hold meetings, and the committees (comprising school representatives) vote on what they want, and they give it to us. We don’t have any say-so or power in how those regions and classifications are done. All we do is enforce.”