Today’s NYTimes has a piece on The Glory for Christ Football League, which came into being because Georgia is not one of the twenty-four states that allow homeshcoolers to join public- or private-school teams:
By 2002, the sports-loving sons of Roger and Diana McDaniel had aged out of recreation league football. A school team was not an option.
They had no school. The boys were educated at home, cracking open textbooks — English, math, Bible — about a first-down-marker’s length from their bedroom.
So the McDaniels huddled with two other families and formed a team of 18 players ages 12 to 18.
Blessings fell at their feet. A college abandoned football and provided affordable uniforms and gear. A private high school canceled its season, and the team, now called the North Georgia Falcons, assumed the schedule.
From that small seed has sprouted the Glory for Christ Football League, eight teams composed of home-schoolers and students at small Christian academies.
It’s ironic that here in “the buckle of the Bible Belt,” high school sports trumped the God crowd:
Spurring the growth in Georgia is a stipulation that only enrolled students can take part in sports at member schools of the Georgia High School Association. Early on, Diana McDaniel lobbied the state assembly and education board to open the stadiums and gyms to the home-schooled. The association stood its ground, maintaining that eligibility abuses and improper recruiting could flourish.
Twenty-four states allow the home-educated to join public- or private-school teams, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, and the number is growing. […]
The McDaniels and others have since warmed to Georgia’s policy, content to operate independently and set their own bylaws. Glory for Christ has hung a “no girls allowed” sign that contrasts with the state association’s policy.
Not like your daddy’s football league:
[O]nce a player becomes a Falcon, Roger McDaniel said, “if you mess up one time, you’re gone.”
Coaches, volunteers all, sign a code of conduct that forbids tobacco products and cursing. Players utter the rare profanity after an error or a rattling hit.
“This is a ministry opportunity around football,” Force Coach Scott Dorsey said. “I’ve been given the chance to show these young men how to go about life Christ-centered and still be a manly man.”
Owen Hargraves, a home-schooler who plays for the league’s Christian Heritage Academy team, said: “We’re almost more like a prayer group than a football team.
A slideshow accompanies the story. The photo above is the second in it.