The state of Georgia has long been at the forefront of growth and innovation in high school sports. Thanks to the state’s prominence in high school football and the fast-growing flag football for girls, the spotlight on gridirons in the Peach State has never been brighter.
With this in mind, the time has come for stakeholders in Georgia’s high school and middle school football markets to research, evaluate and benchmark football programs across a consistent and comprehensive set of standards of excellence.
“Nothing like this has ever been done before in Georgia high school and middle school sports,” says I.J. Rosenberg, President of Score Atlanta. “Access to a credible source of standardized, benchmarked and ranked information on how and why football programs perform at the levels they do simply does not exist. This information today is either highly fragmented, anecdotal, or not available.”
With NIL, the transfer portal, and other trends such as the recent Supreme Court ruling that the NCAA can’t limit education-related benefits (such as compensation for student-athletes), the intensity of competition for collegiate athletic scholarships and student-athlete pay is driving the demand by parents, coaches, athletic directors and all stakeholders for more transparency in football programs in the state and how they compare and benchmark against each other. It’s much more than just a winning record in any given year.
Michael Cascone, President and CEO of Sports Reports, has seen first-hand how competitive benchmarking data provides value and “lifts all boats” in a market. He served as President of Forbes Media’s business standardizing, evaluating, and rating the world’s finest hotels on over 800 standards of operational excellence. The Forbes Travel Guide Star Ratings, the most valuable and stringent in the world in luxury hospitality, are issued annually using data from performance against these standards. Stakeholders across that market benefit considerably from paid access annually to this valuable benchmarking and performance information.
Cascone sees many similarities in how standards of excellence are applied in that market and the need for them to be applied to high school and middle school athletics. In football, for example, there are many reasons a given program may be performing well or not, and whether that performance is sustainable over the long-term. Many factors determine whether a program is “successful” or not; it is not simply a winning record that defines success anymore. While winning on the field will always remain critically important, parents, student-athletes, and participants are demanding and expecting much more accountability from coaches, programs, and athletic directors to serve the needs of their stakeholders.
Accordingly, Sports Reports will be evaluating and benchmarking categories across football programs in the state of Georgia including, among others:
*Culture & Values
*Middle School Development
*Academic Support
*College Recruiting Support
*Training, Athletic Development & Recovery
*Facilities & Equipment
*Head and Assistant Coaching
*Booster & Community Support
*Competitiveness
*Winning Record
Parents, coaches, ADs, and stakeholders in Georgia’s football market lack access to information benchmarking programs in the state against one another. More importantly, the programs themselves don’t have access to this information readily. Once they do, it will drive greater awareness of how they compete, perform, and stack up in the market. This will serve to make all programs better in the end.
Programs will be able to see more clearly how other programs are performing and use those learnings and successes as a roadmap. Conversely, if a program is performing well, it will now understand why and how it’s succeeding in the market and what it may need to do to remain competitive and on top of its proverbial game.
“What’s remarkable to see when objective standards are measured and benchmarked consistently – as we did at Forbes and other companies do for universities or graduate programs, business and healthcare professionals, or employers and services, as examples – is that it’s not always the institutions or individuals with the most resources who perform successfully,” says Cascone.
“Performance is much more complicated than just resources available, and “success” may be defined quite differently by the various stakeholders engaged with the programs,” he said. “I fully expect to see many football programs – rural, urban, or suburban – performing amazingly well with the resources and people they have. In other words, just because a program may be blessed with abundant resources does not necessarily mean they will outperform their competition across our categories. They may, but the data will be enlightening and serve to lift everyone up. The tide should rise accordingly for the market as a whole.”
Keys to success for Sports Reports will come, in part, by collaborating with its partners at Score Atlanta, the Georgia Elite Classic and Born to Compete. Rosenberg began his career in sports in Atlanta in 1985 and launched Score Atlanta in 2004. Score Atlanta has been involved in covering and promoting high school sports for more than 20 years in Georgia. There is no other company in the state with more experience, expertise or relationships in high school football. The Georgia Elite Classic hosts the largest and most-successful high school all-star games broadcast on TV annually in the state. The Georgia Elite Classic is in its 12th year and has its finger on the pulse of the best high school athletes and programs in Georgia.
Similarly, for more than 15 years, Alex Benson and Born to Compete have been the most credible and long-standing platform in the state for middle school and youth football development and exposure. Benson’s excellent and dedicated work with middle school football athletes and their communities through Born to Compete was recently recognized by the Georgia Legislature and House of Representatives Resolution 1097 in February of 2024.
“Sports Reports will be an invaluable tool to help parents make the right decisions for their child,” says Benson. “It could be the difference in ensuring their child is on the right track to maximizing their potential.”
Cascone, Rosenberg and Benson have spent the first part of the year talking to multiple stakeholders in the state, including representatives from the Georgia High School Association, school superintendents, principals, athletic directors, head coaches, booster club presidents and community members.
“In addition to football, I doubt there are many other states that can compare with Georgia when it comes to high school sports. From basketball to volleyball to wrestling, from baseball to softball, from lacrosse to soccer, they are all at the top nationally,” said Rosenberg. “I think we’re going to be surprised to see the many benefits a solution like Sports Reports will drive not only in football but across many other sports in the state in the future.”
Sports Reports’ first benchmarking products will be available to the market in 2025. They will be available via Sports Reports’ mobile application and online website at https://sportsreports.ai/. Sports Reports will also be promoted through the various channels of its partners at Score Atlanta, the Georgia Elite Classic and Born to Compete.
For more information from Score Atlanta or the Georgia Elite Classic, contact I.J. Rosenberg at ijrosenberg@scoreatl.com.
For more information from Sports Reports or Born to Compete, contact Michael Cascone at mjcascone@sportsreports.ai.
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