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Gridiron Association member wants group to push for more support from BoE
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Jeff Whitte
Bryan County News
Published: Sep 30, 2014, 2:02 AM

If Erin Cowan has her way, members of the Bryan County Board of Education will start hearing from the Richmond Hill High School Gridiron Association on a regular basis.

Cowan, a member of the Association and a parent, wants the football booster club to push for financial support from the BoE for better facilities, better equipment, more coaches and a full-time athletic director for RHHS.

She raised the issues Monday at the group’s meeting and pointed to success the school’s track and cross country boosters and coach Levi Sybert had in convincing the BoE to spring for $300,000 to refurbish the school’s track while also laying groundwork for a possible track and cross country complex that could allow Richmond Hill to host state, regional and national events.

The BoE approved the measure at last week’s meeting at Bryan County Middle School. Earlier this year, Sybert and boosters gave the BoE a plan for such a facility that would allow the school to host home meets and be available for community use for events such as the Special Olympics and AAU meets.

The lesson of last week’s victory by track supporters wasn’t lost on Cowan, who called herself “the mouth of Richmond Hill,” and said it was time to start talking about what the program needs to move forward.

“We have got to get together as a group and start pushing like the track and field booster club did,” she said, and other boosters agreed. That evidently led Gridiron Association President Eric Berisford to name her to lead a committee that will prioritize the program’s needs and then come up with a plan to lobby for change.

During the meeting, Cowan talked of RHHS’ possible move to Class AAAAAA – the Georgia High School Association gave RHHS a waiver in 2013 which allowed it to stay in Class AAAAA for the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 school years due to its isolation from other AAAAAA schools, but apparently there’s concern RHHS won’t stay in AAAAA when the next reclassification begins next year.

If that happens, the Wildcats will find themselves competing in the state’s largest classification beginning in the fall of 2016 and Cowan said the school’s facilities just don’t stack up to those at schools like Bradwell Institute, Camden County, Ware County and even Liberty County, a Class AAAA school in Hinesville.

Among problems Cowan and other boosters want to see addressed are weight room facilities, the addition of a certified exercise coach to the staff and a priority put on fixing the bathrooms at Wildcat Stadium, which she said were apparently so bad “they clog up after 20 people use them.”

Other boosters agreed, and one said Wildcat Stadium bathrooms were called “the ghetto” by some parents from Liberty County.

Cowan also raised the issue of a pickup donated to Richmond Hill High School a few years ago for former-coach Lyman Guy to drive. Guy left the program to go to Toombs County for more money and a shorter commute – he’s from there – and apparently the pickup went to the school instead of remaining with the football program.

“That truck our principal is driving around, it was donated solely for Coach Guy to drive back and forth …. “ Cowan said. “The school does pay the insurance, but the truck was donated to the football program and our coaches aren’t in that truck anymore.”

Cowan suggested the school’s allowing the principal to use the pickup is emblematic of the way the Bryan County Board of Education and school administrators treat athletics.

The BoE has long been criticized for being tight-fisted when it comes to athletics, but in recent years it has opened up its purse strings where school sports are concerned. In the wake of Guy’s departure last year the BoE raised coaching supplements – additional money paid to coaches for the extra hours outside the classroom they put in -- and recently approved spending more than $500,000 on fixing athletic fields at RHHS.

The BoE also paid about $1 million last year for a new field house and weight room for Bryan County High School and Bryan County Middle School and in recent years has added lights to softball fields.

But the system’s rapid growth – particularly in South Bryan – has at times caused headaches as coaches try to oversee sports programs bursting at the seams with kids wanting to play. Guy frequently and privately lobbied for more coaches as the number of athletes coming out for football soared to over 100 students.

Cowan said her freshman son gave up on football this year after the school didn’t have a helmet for him – something first-year coach Josh Eads, who was at Monday’s meeting, said was due to a miscalculation when they were ordered.

No members of the school board or school administration were at Monday’s meeting, which was held at the school cafeteria.

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Later yall, its been fun
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Ted O'Neil
Updated: May 23, 2018, 6:03 PM
Published: May 23, 2018, 6:05 PM

This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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