Today’s interviewee is new GHSA executive director Tim Scott, who replaced the retired Robin Hines in July. Scott has been superintendent of Dalton Public Schools, assistant superintendent of operations in the Douglas County School System and principal at Douglas County, Dublin and alma mater Northside of Warner Robins.
1. It’s the first week of the football season. Will you be taking in any games? “I’ll be at the Benz most of the day Saturday. That’s the Dave Hunter + Corky Kell Classic [at Mercedes-Benz Stadium]. I’m super excited about that. Those guys do a great job running it. Locally, I’m looking to go to the Starr’s Mill-Northgate game Friday. I live in Coweta County, so that one’s close to me. I’ve got them mapped out for the season. I’m going all over the state. I’m going to be up in Dalton, and I’m going down to the southern part of the state to Tift County and Richmond Hill. Our whole staff does that. Jay Russell and Carror Wright and Marvin James, all of them have a schedule. That’s what we do. I love to watch schools compete, and Georgia does as good a job as anybody in the nation at our athletics. I also want to be visible for people and meet them and talk to our officials and just thank them for what they do and watch our young people compete and our coaches coach and our fans have a good time.”
2. You were a high school player and coach as well. What’s your best memory of a game or any high school football moment? “When I think back to when I played at Northside, I think about the guys that I played with and how we stay in contact through the years. I don’t mean I talk with them every month, but when you see them and revisit, there’s still that camaraderie there, even if it’s been years since you’ve seen some of them. If you’d asked me that 20 years ago, I might think of a game, but now it’s the relationships with the guys. Some of them I worked with over the years. Kevin Kinsler was a coach at Northside who won a state championship as a head coach and a few with Conrad Nix as an assistant. He and I not only played together [at Northside, then West Georgia], but I had a chance to coach with him for a few years, and then he was still a coach there when I was principal.” [When prodded, Scott did acknowledge good memories of his final regular-season high school game in 1978. Northside beat Warner Robins 21-20 for the city and region championship before 20,000 fans at what was then was called International City Stadium, now McConnell-Talbert. Warner Robins scored a touchdown with 1:52 left, went for two and had a pass batted down. Warner Robins coach Robert Davis paradoxically said afterward, “I let my heart let me make the decision over my mind on the two-point play. That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I’d do it again under the same circumstances.”]
3. Conrad Nix was your coach, and he won more than 250 games and a pair of state titles in Georgia. What was he like? “I got a unique perspective of Coach Nix because I played for him as a player, coached with him as a coach and then served as principal when he was my head coach. Just a quality man that cares about people. He did things the right way, and he cared about the whole school. He’d do whatever he could to help. If another program needed help, he’d help them out. You won’t find a guy with a better heart.”
4. When first hired, you stated your initial goals were to learn as quickly as you could and make good communication a priority. Now that you’ve settled into the job for a few weeks, is there an issue that stands out as especially important for the GHSA to address? “We’re taking a close look at competitive balance now. That would be one. This is not something that’s new. It’s something that Robin and others had been looking at for some time. It’s making [reclassification] decisions based more on things that happen on the field or on the court and not just the numbers of students in a school, where you’re not Class 6A just because you’ve got a certain number of students. I think it’s important to get things more balanced. We want to give a young person a better opportunity to compete and have a chance to win. We’re talking about the whole school, not by individual sport. Maybe you have a school where the soccer program wins all the time but nothing else does, or a football team like that. Hopefully we can make something happen with it. We’ve studied other states that have done this. But the GHSA office supports a competitive-balance model where schools are classified based on overall performance, and schools, not sports teams, move up or down in class.”
[Some see a competitive-balance reclassification model as an equitable way to re-integrate private schools with public schools. In the latest reclassification, private schools in classes 3A to A will play in private-only state playoffs. Scott expressed support to having public and private schools play for the same championships in all sports. “I would like to see them all back together, but I’m just one person,” he said. “That has to go through the executive committee. But it certainly would be nice to have everybody back.”]
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