Craig Parrott

Craig Parrott admits to being a Weather Channel junkie this time of year. No, he doesn’t chase storms or dream of switching jobs with Jim Cantore. Parrott’s obsession was born out of necessity.

The Ridgeland High School athletic director, like most of his peers, is good at number crunching, and the numbers he’s pored over for this school year are cause for concern. Rising fuel costs will take a bigger bite out of athletic budgets this year, so the one thing Parrott doesn’t want to see is a rainy Friday night.

“I start looking at the 10-day forecast early,” Parrott admitted recently. “When we have a chance at a good (football) gate, we have to take advantage of it. So far, we’ve been very lucky since I’ve been here.”

Parrott and other ADs know football is king in determining athletic budgets. A good season of home football attendance means school officials can rest easier the rest of the year. A poor turnout? Well, that’s something no one wants to think about.

“We have two or three games a year where, if we don’t have good weather, it just kills the athletic budget,” said Ridgeland football coach Mark Mariakis, whose team opened its season in front of a standing-room-only home crowd against Walker County rival Gordon Lee a week ago. “The Gordon Lee game is one of those. The first game of the year, with a crowd like that, it just gives the program a big boost for the rest of the year.”

Now that he’s taken himself off the football sideline, Dalton athletic director Ronnie McClurg has been able to spend more time focusing on his school’s athletic budget. As with most schools, only two or three sports can be counted on to make money, so any unexpected shortfalls can be devastating to a budget.

“Here, football, basketball and boys’ soccer are the only sports in the black, so it’s very important we do well in those sports,” McClurg said. “Non-revenue sports are important, but they are tough on an athletic budget. They make football that much more important. We have to do well in football to help us surivive in other sports.”

The latest Georgia High School Association reclassification wasn’t kind to the budgets of Dalton and Northwest Whitfield. In the previous four years they were placed in a region made up of all northwest Georgia teams, with the longest league travel being to Rome. These next two years, with Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe, Ringgold, Ridgeland, Southeast Whitfield and LaFayette moved down to Class AAA, Dalton and Northwest will travel several times to Paulding, Cobb and Cherokee counties. And that’s not the worst part of it.

“This year, we have two good home games we can count on big crowds, Calhoun and Northwest,” McClurg said. “The other three schools we host — South Paulding, Woodland and Cass — won’t bring many people. That means we have to have good crowds for the two big games.”

You won’t see McClurg or Ridgeland’s Parrott doing any rain dances on Fridays this fall.

“Football is so important,” Parrott said, “that we’re one rainy Friday night from being in really bad shape.”