Today’s interviewee is Steve Slay, a volunteer researcher with the Georgia High School Football Historians Association. For the past 15 years or so, Slay has combed college football rosters annually to document Georgia players. This year, he tracked down 4,631 Georgia players off the more than 850 college rosters. He’s also entered thousands of scores on the GHSFHA website through the years. In his real job, Slay is a senior territory manager for the Donaldson Company.
Steve Slay, volunteer researcher for GHSFHA
1. What’s your background with high school football? What makes you such a big fan of it? “My dad played at R.E. Lee down in Thomaston back in the day. We were sports fans growing up. I played football, basketball and baseball when I was 7 or 8. We would go down to Thomaston to visit family. My grandmother’s next-door neighbor played for R.E. Lee. He was always good and kind to me. He’d throw the football to me. One night, R.E. was playing Griffin, and that was their archrival, and I went to the game. It was neat knowing somebody out there playing, and I got hooked on it from that time on. I grew up in Tucker, and when I was a kid, I played football in the Tucker Football League, their feeder system. I had older kids in my neighborhood who played at Tucker, so I gravitated toward them and watched them play. I was still going to games until COVID, and that stopped it a little bit. I’ll usually hit the semifinals or the finals. I still watch games on TV. I watched Rabun County and Thomasville last Friday.”
2. When and why did you start researching the college rosters? “In my 20s and 30s, I got transferred away to Minneapolis, and I wanted to know what happened to these kids I’d watched play or read about in the newspaper. I’d watch a game on TV, whether it was Georgia or Auburn or somebody in the Midwest, and I’d see ‘sophomore from Tifton’ or somewhere like that, so I became curious about where these guys played in high school. I started putting them on a spreadsheet. I found a website that has the links to all the D-I, D-II, D-III and NAIA teams in one place. It has everything there but the JUCO stuff. So I found a path and found out I could actually do this. That was when Jack Keith was running the GAVSV board. I started putting stuff on there about the Georgia players and people read it and they’d say, ‘This is awesome, can you find out this for my school?’ So I thought I’d do it for all the teams.”
3. What does the research entail? How long does it take? What are some obstacles? “The biggest thing is finding the time, but it’s not as daunting as it appears. I won’t start until November because I like for the rosters to be settled, especially nowadays with the portal and transfers. I can knock it out in less than a month. Most of the schools, even Division III, will have their rosters on the internet. More than 90% [of rosters] will say they played at this school in that town, but sometimes they’ll just have a name and a position, or sometimes just have a town. Sometimes you have a hometown that isn’t in Georgia but the player played in Georgia, so you have to be careful. You might see Chattanooga, but the player played at Ridgeland, or Jacksonville and he played at Camden County. I see that more along the Columbus-Phenix City border. Sometimes a kid will move after college. He’ll put Las Vegas when he played at Clinch County. You just have to be thorough when looking at rosters.’’ [Slay says he might fail to get a roster from only about five schools or less per year, and they’re often schools that might not have a Georgia player. That’s out of more than 850 football-playing schools. He fails to get a roster on the rare occasions when a school doesn’t post an online roster, or the roster lacks the necessary information and the school doesn’t respond to requests.]
4. What are some of the more interesting things you’ve learned through compiling it? “I’ve learned that coaches and contacts mean a lot. Sometimes I’ll see an obscure NAIA school out in Nebraska or Iowa and find they’ve got 12 to 15 kids from Georgia. How do they end up there? Army has more kids from Georgia [30] than any other state. Obviously good football is played here. Anything you hear about Georgia has it third, fourth or fifth in producing college football players, but it’s not just football talent. If you look at the Ivy League or the Little Ivies, you’ve got to be pretty smart to get in them, and they have a lot of Georgia players too, so there’s talent and brains coming out of Georgia. I don’t think that gets talked about enough.”
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