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Publish date: Sep 1, 2010

Georgia State huddles up for football debut

By Michelle Hiskey
For NCAA.org

Football record books stack high at places like Alabama, Ohio State and UCLA. Football traditions and memories run deep at schools like Penn State, Texas and Florida State.

Before today, Georgia State’s football history filled nothing but a blank slate. All that will change tonight when the NCAA Division I Panthers huddle up for their football debut, in the Georgia Dome against the NAIA’s Shorter University.

“Everyone is just excited, there’s no other way to put it,” school President Mark Becker said Wednesday. “We’ve been talking about it a long time, and there’s been a ton of media attention, but now it’s time to play football.”

The game will mark a homecoming for head coach Bill Curry. A Super Bowl center who formerly coached at Alabama, Kentucky and Georgia Tech, Curry grew up in nearby College Park, Ga.

“I can’t believe we finally get to play a game,” Curry said. “I wake up in the middle of the night and pinch myself just to make sure it’s real.”

On the opposing sideline for Georgia State’s inaugural football game today is a team with a slight head start.

Shorter College started football five years ago, throwing together a team in five weeks to make a conference deadline.
They scrambled to find enough helmets. They had no weight room. Until last year, players drove with their own equipment a recreation center for practices.

There are no game tapes to prepare a program for its first game ever.

“You are going to have to play before you are prepared to play,” said Shorter coach Phil Jones. “You have to step up there, and you risk a lot when you do.”

Shorter lost its debut against Webber International (Fla.) by a touchdown, but now football is history. The Hawks have posted four consecutive winning seasons, won a conference championship and a spot in the NAIA football championship series.

The sport helped double the student body at the school, founded in 1873 as an all-female college. Located a two-hour drive from Atlanta in Rome, Ga., Shorter became a university on June 1.

“First and foremost, (this game) gives our coaches and players the opportunity to perform in what we expect will be our largest crowd ever,” said Shorter Athletics Director Bill Peterson, referring to the 28,155-seat lower bowl of the Georgia Dome.

“Having been a part of the first game ever for Shorter back in 2005, we know just how exciting that can be.”

Since the program was announced on April 17, 2008, football has already sparked a new identity and higher profile for the downtown Atlanta campus of 31,000 students.

Applications are up 21 percent this year, a rise attributed partly to Panther fever.

It’s a big, new debut in a city that loves pomp and revival. Atlanta rose from the ashes after the Civil War and inspired the best-selling novel of all time, “Gone with the Wind.”

At GSU, football has come in on a lot of huffing and puffing, facing a deadline for the thousands of details that go into a football program.

Finding players, for starters.

Ben Jacoby thought football was history for him. He had left a scholarship at Ball State after the coach who recruited him moved on. Back home in suburban Atlanta, Jacoby heard about the Panthers.

“Growing up, all I knew about Georgia State was they didn’t have football,” he said. “They had a swimming pool that we used for our county meet in high school.”

Jacoby’s doubt crumbled under Curry’s pitch: Wouldn’t he regret not being a part of history?

“So I put my helmet on again,” said Jacoby, now 21, and the Panthers starting center, “and it’s like I never missed a beat…Everyone is so excited about having a football team here, it’s overwhelming.”

Schools who take football for granted need only look south for the difference the sport − in absentia − makes in community life.

Spread in pockets of the state capital, Georgia State’s campus has been known as a commuter school without a central gathering place and far less school spirit than state powerhouses Georgia Tech and University of Georgia.

Georgia State supporters are hoping the Georgia Dome (capacity 28,155 in its lower bowl) will become a rallying spot.

“It offers an opportunity for people to congregate in a central area for a community cause,” said Dr. Megan Sexton, who received her doctorate from GSU, teaches in the English department and co-edits the literary magazine Five Points. “Everyone I’ve heard talking about it, students and others who I work with, are very positive about it.”

GSU is banking that the start of football – its $4.5 million budget funded largely by student activity fees – to complete the cycle of a traditional college experience.

“Football, particularly in the South, probably will do as much as anything to raise the profile of an institution,” said Becker, the school president. “I don’t agree that athletics, whether football or basketball, wags the tail of the academic dog. For nearly a century Georgia State has had high-quality programs. Adding football rounds out the experience for our students and student-athletes.”

There are expectations on campus that, even if the football team is flat, the games will showcase what’s long been sharp at Georgia State, such as music. The marching band has 140 students and a fight song (“We’re from the ATL/ We’re gonna give them hell”) that blends Sousa and New South.

“As a musician, I think football will revive a lot of downtown establishments’ live music,” said GSU music graduate and current grad student Matthew Kaminski.

Georgia State football photo by Todd Drexler

As organist for the Atlanta Braves, Kaminski knows the power of a soundtrack to shape fans’ experience. Now the football recruits, he thinks, will lead to music recruits: “The marching band will be another good way of getting students into the music program.”

As for traditions, some Georgia State fans say their first tailgate menu will include short ribs – a jab at opponent Shorter.

Jacoby, the center, would like to see one tradition begin with his team: graduating all players.

So many football rituals, like Ohio State’s dotting the “I,” evolve over time.

“I have no idea what some of ours will be,” said Becker. “I will make a prediction that we won’t develop a bonfire around our homecoming. We won’t get a permit for (downtown Atlanta landmark) Woodruff Park.”

Win or lose, the game will spark records and memories that form the foundation of college football. today’s kickoff is Georgia State’s pilot light for football, and the team color, fittingly, is bright blue.

Michelle Hiskey is an award-winning journalist based in Decatur, Ga., and a former Duke University student-athlete.