The facilities and equipment that the football team at Waynesboro High School has to use are an embarrassment. And we’re still waiting for somebody else to do something about the situation … why?
I’m in the locker room weekly to talk with coach Steve Isaacs for a weekly podcast that we do at AugustaFreePress.com associated with our live web streaming of WHS football games on Friday nights. Having been there a few times this season, I’m not even sure the word embarrassment is a fair and accurate description of what we have, or don’t have. The space is about as big as my office on Main Street, and the smell is so bad that the approach to improving it involves the placement of urinal cakes, “when we can keep them in here,” Coach Isaacs said to me last week, noting that the urinal cake most recently used to add whatever positivity to the fragrance in the air it could was missing in action.
It goes beyond facilities. Top to bottom, everything from uniforms to practice equipment to Isaacs’ own office, which I could fit comfortably into the bathroom in my office, is substandard.
At first glance I don’t want to disagree with the assessment in an August editorial in the News Virginian that offered the idea that you don’t want to “blame the Little Giants’ want of success in recent years on their facilities,” but then … well, maybe you can.
Let’s step back in time and over the Blue Ridge to Isaacs’ last coaching gig, at Western Albemarle in Crozet. New uniforms, new shoes, a 32-inch TV for coaches to break down game tapes, all provided by the boosters’ club, “and when I left there, we had $12,000 that I didn’t know what to do with,” Isaacs said.
The method to the madness wasn’t rocket science. It was hard work by the boosters and parents and kids in the program. The program’s cash cow was its regular work in concession stands at Scott Stadium working UVa. football games and at the John Paul Jones Arena working basketball games and concerts and other JPJ entertainment events.
The program made $7,000 clear one weekend working the Rolling Stones show at JPJ, Isaacs said.
All it takes is a little elbow grease, then, and our problem is solved, right?
Needless to say, we’re still staring at a problem with facilities and equipment, so it’s clearly going to take more than a little elbow grease to get this one worked out.
We’re good in Waynesboro at complainin’, I like to say. Because complain here about everything. Our downtown is dying. We complain about that, about the people who are supposed to do something about it, about how dumb their ideas are, about how much money it’s going to cost to do something. We complain about our industries leaving us. And about how nobody is doing anything to keep them here, or bring new ones here. And about how much it costs to have somebody in charge of that, and how we’ve had that job open for more than a year now, and still can’t get anybody to work it.
With WHS football we complain that it’s going on a decade since the team has been a winner. We complain that we can’t keep a coach for more than a couple of years. We complain that whoever the coach is now doesn’t know what he’s doing, that Lee over in Staunton has the same population of kids that we have, and they’re always winning.
Well, it’s time to stop complainin’ and start doing something about it. If I’m a student at WHS, and I walk in a locker room that smells so bad that it takes a urinal cake to take the stink off, that is so squeezed for space that you’d have more room to dress out in a telephone booth, I’d probably take a pass, too, like a lot of the kids have been doing for years and years now.
What does that mean for Waynesboro? Aside from losing games on Friday nights, it means some kids falling through the cracks. A case in point comes from my own family. A cousin who was a talented football player was injured his junior year and had to sit out football season and then basketball season to do rehab on his shoulder. Sports were what kept his interest in school, and what kept his grades up, because if you don’t make the grades, you don’t play.
He ended up dropping out and in prison.
That’s an extreme example, but it doesn’t take a kid going to prison to have the community lose out.
There’s no sense waiting on the School Board to take care of the situation with WHS football, because to be frank about it, the School Board doesn’t have any money. The economic downturn has hit public schools the hardest, and that’s on top of the push from the City Council here to have the school system operate on as lean a budget as possible to get by.
The city not being able to do anything is a given, so the solution comes down to we, the people. Schlepping hot dogs and sodas on Saturdays at UVa. and maybe up the road at JMU. Holding bake sales and car washes. Maybe getting ourselves organized to the point where we write grant requests that we could leverage with a small bit of seed money from the city or a local industry foundation.
Getting really creative, we could ask the School Board to sign off on selling naming rights to the football field to, say, Ntelos or Invista, in a long-term deal that brings a stable source of revenues to not only the football program but all high-school sports in Waynesboro.
Or perhaps there’s something I’m not thinking of that could save the day or that we could add to the mix.
One thing is for certain – doing things the old Waynesboro way, complainin’ about where we are, about how things aren’t getting done, is going to work out for us about as well as it has to now.
– Column by Chris Graham
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