Mark Crews of Brookwood is one of five head coaches in Saturday’s Corky Kell Classic who has won a state championship. But he has a sense of Kell Classic history that the others don’t.
Crews has been on the sidelines as an assistant or head coach for all 22 renditions of the annual opening-week event that showcases some of the state’s top teams and players in the Georgia Dome.
“People now take for granted that it is feasible to play high school games in the Georgia Dome, but if you go back 20 or 21 years, there was a whole lot of skepticism,” Crews said. “Can you make money? Can you make it work? Now people take it for granted. We’ve played the semifinal games and the championship games in there for several years now.”
Brookwood will play McEachern this season, as they did in 1992 when they started the Kell Classic and participated in the first football game ever held in the Georgia Dome. The Kell Classic added a fifth game last season and drew a record crowd of 33,000. That was despite the games being televised for the first time, by GPB.
The teams that the event draws are the main attraction. Twelve teams that have played in the Kell Classic in August have won state titles in December.
The coaches with state-championship pedigree are Crews and Mickey Conn of Grayson, who won their championships in Georgia, along with Colquitt County’s Rush Propst (five in Alabama), Camden County’s Welton Coffey (one in Florida) and North Gwinnett’s Bob Sphire (one in Kentucky).
Another appeal to this season’s matchups is North-South intrigue. South Georgia teams that are participating include second-ranked Colquitt County and fifth-ranked Camden County. Colquitt County plays No. 10 Grayson, and Camden County plays No. 4 North Gwinnett.
Crews remembers a time when the metro Atlanta teams would have been the clear underdogs to South Georgia’s best.
In 1992, the only metro Atlanta state champion in the highest class in 20 years had been Morrow in 1987. Starting with Dunwoody in 1993, there have been 12 metro champions. There have been 10 from Gwinnett County alone.
“In 1992, everybody thought that anybody who knew how to play football had to live below Macon,” Crews said. “The Kell Classic, putting (metro Atlanta) football in a venue like that, has advanced metro Atlanta football.”
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