Touchdown and Out: Why Galloway Doesn't Have a Football Team

The Friday Night Lights spectacular is a very typical, teenage American stereotype that is in full swing with the fall season. Cheerleaders with sparkly pom poms and petite uniforms egg on the crowd full of students decked out in glitter and glory. On the field, the high school football players trained to their absolute maximum athletic potential pace back and forth. This is, to most high school students, the best night of their week.
Around Atlanta, the stadiums of Riverwood International Charter High School, Chamblee High School, and many more fill with students just like the ones described as they partake in the most all-American activity maybe ever.

The Galloway School, one of Atlanta’s most top-tier schools, is one of the 26 out of 135 private schools in Atlanta that does not offer the praised lifestyle of tossing around the old pigskin.

To most of us, it’s simply always been this way, but to many on the outside of our Chastain bubble, this is baffling and almost unheard of. Why does Galloway isolate itself from the rest of the Metro Atlanta school world?

For one thing, we are far too small. “To have a legitimate football team,” says new head of school Dr. James Calleroz White, “you essentially need to have about a hundred plus kids who are going to play the sport.”

I randomly polled twenty students one afternoon in the library to see how they felt and was left perplexed by the results. Fourteen out of the twenty students enthusiastically said “Yes!” when asked if they wished Galloway had a football team. Mary Pleiss, a tenth grader, said that she thinks a Galloway Friday Night Lights would boost school spirit and community engagement. If 70% of our student body, approximately 220 students, want football, where is the hesitation?

When you break down our school’s numbers, though, it really doesn’t make sense.

Let’s assume the team will be made up of all boys - even though, knowing Galloway, the team would likely be open to whomever wanted to play - the numbers are slim. Upper Learning has a not-so-grand total of 150 boys, and certainly not every single one is interested in playing football.

When I asked my friend Sarah-Anne Seligman how many boys in Upper Learning she thought would be willing to play, she laughed and said, “Honestly, probably two.”

Sarah-Anne’s response was humorous because it really is somewhat true. When you look around Galloway, you see a beautiful blend of different types of students and their interests. You see a flourishing theatre department full of passionate thespians. You see students wearing everything from a suit and tie to the pajamas they slept in the night before. You see hard working, intense Junior Varsity and Varsity basketball teams, that are, of course, no-cut.

The student body of an average public high school does not have the same environment a school like Galloway does. This isn’t a stereotypical false claim; this is the truth.

It’s really hard to say how many of our boys would be engrossed enough to gear up in big shoulder pads and dash through the end zone for Galloway. Is it 30? 15? 5? It’s difficult to determine.

Part of the issue in deciding how many hypothetical students would play is that everyone has their own sports already.  Instead of football, Galloway Athletics includes sports like basketball, cross country, volleyball, softball, and track, which are thriving. Because sports are no-cut, students aren’t afraid to fail and dive into the sports they love, even if perhaps they’re not winning every game.

I sat down with Elise Lander, Galloway’s eighth grade history teacher, and asked her about Elliott Galloway’s vision for athletics and football. Back when she was hired in 1983, Ms. Lander knew Mr. Galloway herself. She noted that The Galloway School did briefly have a team, but “what [Mr. Galloway] realized is the school at the time was so small that in order to form a football team, all the other sports were going to suffer.” This is, out of every reason we don’t have a team, probably the most prominent.

Presumably, for example, the football season lands in the fall, right during cross country. Cross country is the most popular sport at Galloway and was very much a part of Elliott Galloway’s vision, as he was a runner himself. Our runners would likely have to decide between one or the other, and, due to our lack of numbers, both sports would respectively suffer.

Ms. Lander adds that she thinks that deep down, Mr. Galloway knew football is a rough sport. Being a mother, and the concussion and brain disease epidemic among players, she doesn’t want football getting close to our campus ever.

With that being said, one could argue that having football at Galloway would attract and maintain enrollment. The shiny High School Musical vision of football and cheerleading is very attractive to a lot of teens and would bring a new wave of students, considering Galloway loses a plethora of students to big public high schools. To that, though, Dr. Calleroz White sees no advantages in obliging to these students fantasies. “We’d have to change who we really are to bring in people who are interested in football,” he said. “That’s not something I feel like I’m willing to do for a school that has rich and amazing traditions in all these other areas.”

Will there ever be a #ScotsNation themed Friday Night Lights? It doesn’t seem likely.  If our high schoolers are really wishing for football, Dr. C.W. says, “The great thing about Atlanta and the schools around here is that there are plenty of places they can go for it.”  Instead of feeling isolated from the rest of the community, let’s follow Dr. C.W.’s vision and work hard to amp up our student sections for the seasons to come. After all, in our own Galloway way, our Friday Night Lights on the basketball courts in January will always be superior to the nights on the football fields.

By Annie Levy