This is our third year of publishing a coaches’ newsletter. The main idea behind this series is to help you get to know us a little better and to aid you in understanding the officials’ perspective of high school football.

In this, the first in the 2007 series, we thought to share with you some information from last year’s football season. Last year was the second year of GHSA assigning officiating contracts to local officials’ associations. There are 21 associations sanctioned by GHSA to do high school football in the state of Georgia. Multi-County is about averaged sized among the GHSA-sanctioned associations. We had 84 different officials work on-field in one or more varsity games in 2006. There are almost exactly 1800 high school football officials in the whole of Georgia; this makes 86 officials the average size for a local football officials association.

For 2006 we had the home schedule (four or more home games) of 15 schools, we did two home games for 1 school and we covered one home game for 10 other schools. Among this last category were 4 games where GHSA asked us to take a “road trip” outside our normal geographic area to cover the inevitable imbalances in schedules that arise in the school-to-association assignment process. For schools in regions 6-AAAA or 8-AAAA, chances are you saw us on the road as well as at home since we had so many schools’ contracts in those two regions.

In the 2006 post-season, we worked 6 first-round playoff games, 3 second-round games and 1 game in the third-round. These 10 games represent 6.45% of the 155 playoff games played in the state. The average number of games available per association was just 7.38. Therefore, our playoff assignments exceeded the statewide average by some 35%. We were pleased with this recognition of the hard work put in by members of our association. Though not everyone in MCFOA got the privilege of working a playoff game, the week-to-week results by all our crews was what we believe earned us the extra playoff assignments. We are proud of the quality of crews we are able to put onto the field every week. Our goal is to see that every game is played as safely as possible, that each team has an equal chance under the rules to win and that the highest standards of sportsmanship are maintained by all participants.

We hope you’ll take the time after each game to rate our crew’s performance. We maintain an “Evaluate a Crew” page on our web site, www.mcfoafootball.org. You can find all sorts of interesting stuff on our web site, including back copies of previous issues of our coaches’ newsletter.

We’re already looking forward to the 31^st of August. Good luck in the upcoming season.