GHSA confounds logic with new regions

There's a movie you probably have never heard of called Blankman, which stars Damon Wayans as a superhero who fights crime in his bathrobe.

There is a scene in the movie in which Wayans' brother, played by David Alan Grier, is at work at a tabloid media organization in the vein of the National Enquirer. To get ideas for stories, the editor throws three darts at a board of topics, and the story idea is an amalgamation of the topics.

You probably are now thinking: Why did he bring this up?

I think that a similar scene took place a few weeks ago in Thomaston, Ga., at the biennial re-classification meeting of the Georgia High School Association.

The members of the committee took out big, shiny darts labeled with school names and hurled them at a map of Georgia.

That is the only plausible explanation for putting Evans, Greenbrier and Lakeside in the same region as Glynn Academy, Ware County and Brunswick for region games.

Alabama is closer to the three Columbia County schools. So is Tennessee and North Carolina. Could you imagine Evans playing Independence High in Charlotte, N.C., in a region game? That trip would be more than an hour shorter than the trip to Ware County, in south Georgia.

The longest trek for the county schools is to Wayne County and Effingham County. The new region trips will make the old ones seem like a drive to Hephzibah.

The best idea would have been keeping Green-brier, Evans, Lakeside, Statesboro and Richmond Academy in the region, along with Baldwin High and Jones County - middle Georgia schools that have been in the region for two years. South Georgia schools should stay with south Georgia schools.

The next plausible option would have been letting the Columbia County schools play with schools in the Macon or Clayton County areas. Under the realignment, those two areas are combined with Baldwin High and Jones County in a 14-team region.

Yet Region 1-AAAA has only four schools: Americus-Sumter, Bain-bridge, Lee County and Thomas County Central. The GHSA allows four playoff teams from every region. That means every school in Region 1-AAAA will make the playoffs in every sport.

Why not take Brunswick, Glynn Academy and Ware County - which previously was in the five-team Region 1-AAAA - and place them with the four schools for a seven-school region?

I guess, though, it is too hard to hit the bull's-eye.