How Alabama high schools decide on moving football games when weather threatens

Going into the beginning of last week, there were seven Alabama High School Athletic Association football games scheduled to be played on Thursday night. By midweek, that number had suddenly jumped to around 109.

Weather reports from around the state were predicting storms; and even if it didn’t storm, the odds for rain, and plenty of it, were good.

So rather than taking a chance on rain delays or postponements, schools made a game-week decision to move their games from Friday to Thursday.

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It’s a move that isn’t taken lightly and one that, regardless if it’s the home or visiting team, requires many moving parts to come together at lightning speed.

Bibb County and American Christian Academy are two schools that made a last-minute switch for their matchups originally scheduled for Friday in Centreville on Bibb County's home field.

“We basically have a look at the weather for the week,” said Bibb County coach Matt Geohagan. “I try and do that on the weekend heading into the upcoming week.”

That preview gives him insight, not only for game night but for daily practice plans.

By Tuesday morning, Geohagan not only saw the potential for Friday’s inclement weather but began seeing games statewide moving to Thursday.

“I called (ACA) coach (Cody) Martin Tuesday afternoon and said, ‘Hey, our field will be in bad shape if it rains as much as they say it will rain, if it rains all day. What do you think about moving it to Thursday night?’ He said, ‘Coach, that’s not a problem. Let me check with my AD and make sure we’ve got transportation.’“

Turns out, ACA athletics director Rob Cain was already on it. Cain, in his 13th year at ACA, is no stranger to weather issues with outdoor sports. He got in touch with local meteorologist Richard Scott, who told him that Friday, indeed, was not looking favorable.

With the luck of timing, Cain was working as public address announcer at the Patriots’ junior varsity football game that afternoon and announced the game change. As soon as that game ended, Cain went into overtime.

“The first thing I did was get on the phone to the bus charter company,” said Cain.

ACA uses charters for trips of 45 minutes or more. Only one school bus is available, and it can’t fit the travel party and equipment. In order to make it happen − the charter company already had bookings − one charter bus would take the team to Centreville and another would return the team to Tuscaloosa.

Meals had to be rescheduled. Cheerleaders and others were notified.

The majority of logistics fell on the host. Geohagan had to notify game officials, the AHSAA, his school's cheerleaders, band, concessions, gate attendants, police, ambulance services, medical staff, booster club, the field and scoreboard crews, team meal providers and even make the change to the AHSAA Dragonfly game tracker system.

Social media helped get word out to fans.

And he got one less practice day.

“We’d had two days of practice,” Geohagan said. “We got a lot of work in, a lot of game-planning. We basically took what our normal Thursday practice looks like and did that on Wednesday and added a little bit more stuff at the end to make sure that we’d covered all the adjustments and changes that we’d been making.”

Geohagan said moving the game didn’t affect attendance. In fact, he thinks it helped.

“I don’t know how great our ticket sales would have been if it had been storming," he said. "I’m not sure we’d have had as many people in the stands, so it helped us moving it up because we had more people at the game.”

“We were the road team, but we packed out our side,” Cain said.

ACA won 20-14, and both teams got a rare fall Friday night off.

“We used Friday to review film, made corrections and got a head start on Sipsey Valley,” said Geohagan.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: How Alabama high schools decide to change games when weather threatens