I lived there for 7 years but never figured they would pull it off...
VALDOSTA, Ga. — The Friday night lights shine a little brighter here. Literally. High above the new Sprinturf playing surface and armchair seating for its season ticketholders — and beyond the new locker rooms, press box and football museum that also came with the $7.5-million renovation of Cleveland Field at Bazemore-Hyder Stadium — Valdosta High School installed the same high-performance lights used a couple of hundred miles to the south at Daytona International Speedway.
Valdosta High School recently spent $7.5 million on renovations to its stadium.
By Oscar Sosa for USA TODAY
They spotlight a high school football program that, even among the nation's elite, stands out. Valdosta has won a national-record 816 games in 92 years, giving the south Georgia city of 45,000 its identity as "Winnersville, USA."
So cherished are season tickets that they're handed down in wills and parceled out in divorce settlements, and so hopeful are fathers of siring future Wildcats that they've toted newborn sons from the hospital in cat-pawed Valdosta helmets.
Feeding this football juggernaut is a more than $300,000 budget that dwarfs those for nearly all of the nation's top high school programs, as determined by 22 years of USA TODAY rankings. If Valdosta plays deep into the playoffs, its spending balloons past $400,000.
The Wildcats' 1,500-member booster organization, the Touchdown Club, kicks in another $85,000-$90,000 a year, says former president and longtime board member David Waller. The club outfits coach Rick Darlington in a four-wheel drive pickup and underwrote a recent $100,000 overhaul of the weight room.
Total annual investment: close to a half-million dollars.
"There's really nothing about this place that's common," says Darlington, hired from Apopka, Fla., after a national search and six games into in his second season at Valdosta. "I've heard us called the Yankees of high school football."
Indeed, "Valdosta has kind of set the bar," says Charles Turner, president of the Georgia Athletic Directors Association and recently retired as AD at Athens' Cedar Shoals High. "Hey, they've been nationally ranked and had great teams for years. Everybody else, I think, is trying to catch up to them."
Expensive as it may be.
Valdosta takes the "Winnersville" nickname, adopted in the early 1970s, to heart. Its teams have won 23 state championships and six mythical national titles since 1940, and the Wildcats are a composite No. 2 in final USA TODAY rankings since 1982 (they finished No. 1 in 1984 and '86). In Darlington's first season, they rose from a 1-3 start to Georgia's Class AAAAA championship game, falling there to Camden County.
To put the school's financial commitment to football in perspective, consider what neighboring Valdosta State spends on a college program that made last year's NCAA Division II playoffs and is ranked 10th in the nation this season.
The Blazers' total is more than $900,000, athletics director Herb Reinhard says. But remove coaches' salaries, which aren't part of the high school's football budget, and scholarship and recruiting expenses and their operating outlay is a little more than $320,000. Or about 25% less than the $419,291 Valdosta High spent in 2003.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/preps...spending_x.htm
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