Georgetown High wins rare appeal, will join local region in 2016

If at first you don’t succeed, appeal and appeal again.

Georgetown High School’s bid to move into a region including Grand Strand and Pee Dee teams and out of another located in and around Charleston was successfully approved on Wednesday by the South Carolina High School League Appellate Panel. It came less than a week after the SCHSL Executive Committee denied the school’s first appeal.

Wednesday’s appeal was essentially Georgetown’s last chance to change regions, and its argument was enough to warrant a 5-2 vote in favor of the school’s wish.

With the secondary appeal granted, Georgetown will now share Region VI-AAA with area programs Aynor, Loris and Waccamaw, as well as Dillon and Lake City, for the 2016-2018 two-year block.

While football coach and co-Athletics Director Bradley Adams said the school is not in a dire situation financially, this move could be the difference in staving off some difficult decisions in the coming years.

“It’s not that we can’t take care of ourselves,” Adams said. “But we have to be very limited for our financial stability. To go to Region VII, it would have been very complicated. We don’t have the luxuries that Horry County has. We have to do what we can survive.”

Georgetown’s appeal was the only one of the day that was overturned from a pool of four schools making similar claims. The Bulldogs were citing an increased travel schedule — to the tune of an average of 15 miles per trip — and a decrease in media coverage if they were placed in the Lowcountry region.

But what may have been the biggest difference wasn’t necessarily the grouping of schools in either. Region VII-AAA (Bishop England, Hanahan, Lake Marion, Manning and Timberland) didn’t have the one school that made the move to Region VI-AAA really make sense.

It is approximately 13 miles from Georgetown High, about 30 miles closer than any other team in either of the two regions. Putting them into a region together also ensured another in-county program was sharing it with the Bulldogs.

“It’s very big from a travel standpoint. But you also have a natural rivalry there,” Adams said. “Every year, you’re competing against that team, and it matters.”

Barring an out-of-the ordinary addition to the process, it appears that realignment for the state’s first-ever two-year block using five classifications is locked in. Carolina Forest, Conway and Socastee will compete in Class AAAAA; Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach and St. James will be in Class AAA; Georgetown, Aynor, Loris and Waccamaw will be in Class AAA; Carvers Bay will be the lone Class AA school and Green Sea-Floyds will hold the same recognition in Class A.

The next step of the realignment process will be for the SCHSL classifications to determine how teams will compete for playoff berths. For football purposes, everything from a points system in every classification to paring down the number of playoff teams has been discussed.

Proposals there could be announced as soon as early October.

This story was originally published September 23, 2015 at 1:10 PM with the headline "Georgetown High wins rare appeal, will join local region in 2016."