Potential Records for Stories

Potential records for individual story:

Team present rosters
Team past rosters
Data on foreign athletes playing for Division 1
Data that could show patterns between athlete’s nationalities and the sport they play

The records that would answer some of the key questions about recruiting patterns would mostly consist of team rosters and maybe some data over years. I think this information would be fairly easy to gain access to. I could look on school websites and get a roster for every single team. Usually online team rosters have it set up where you can click the player’s name and read their bios that state where that player is from. Although this would be tedious and time consuming work, it’s fairly easy that involves little effort outside of open my laptop. Getting data on past recruiting habits, however, may be a little more difficult to find. But I’m sure the NCAA’s website or some other record keeping site would have some of this information.

Potential records for team story:

Rosters of teams
Transfer roster
Data that shows the percentage of football transfers a particular county gets a year
- Or going deeper to how many transfer a school receives a year
Percentage of these transfers that have made it to D1 colleges

The records that would answer key questions for the team story will be more difficult to find than those for my individual story simply because high school records are hard to get a hold of. Jordan has done a great job of compiling a list of local transfers that will be great for contacting sources. Finding the data and percentages will just take patient work, but once the information is compiled and organized, it could present some interesting facts.

NCAA compliance open records

The main records I think I will be looking at for my personal story will be the NCAA infractions of the schools in my story. These lists should be available of the NCAA compliance website, but the database is actually very cumbersome and is proving pretty difficult to use. I’m also thinking about looking into the finances of each school, including salaries of compliance directors. Open Gov should provide these figures for officials at state schools and I can look into the schools’ taxes as we did in a previous assignment to compare different conferences and their distributions to member schools.

Open Records to Get

For your topic and your team’s topic, make lists of potential records you might need to explore your questions. Write up a blog post discussing those records and how you might go about retrieving them. Summarize in the individual storyboard linked above Post in the appropriate category using the tag “open records to get” by Oct. 5

Team Project:

Look for open records that have any information about transferring schools in GA. Hopefully to answer some of these questions:

-What are the rules

-how many kids are transferring a year

-Where are they coming from / which schools are they going to

-Are more girls or boys transferring?

Individual Project:

Look at different open records laws in different states and see how the laws differ from state to state and see how that impacts the SEC

Open Records

Team story: This might be something I’ll have to plot myself, but I’ll want to get a good idea of the amount of kids who have transferred schools in Florida and Texas and where they went to school. This will likely just be a running list that has their coaches’ names as well as the schools. The policies in these schools will also need to be examined, but those should be fairly public and I’m not too worried about finding and reading them.

Personal story: If minutes are kept at these hearings scheduled to discuss the parking policies at the new stadium, I’d like to have those. I’ll also need to keep my own records of businesses in and around the area that are and would be affected by this move. Any information provided to me by sources I talk to based on research that they may have done could be valuable as well.

Open records and our group project

Group:

Alex and I are working on the academic implications of transferring for high school football. While working through the GHSA rule book on transferring, I think an interesting part to look through would be how public schools allocate the funding to the athletic department of the school. I think another interesting thing to look into is the development of these booster clubs and how much they give to the athletic department. I know at my own high school, the scoreboard was funded by a single family in the community and it was a heft project, therefore public funding could go to other entities in the football program.

In terms of the project a more focused open record to request would be:

The official transfer forms and transcripts of athletes that have transferred.
Transcripts of students that go from private to public and vice versa.
- Some academic requirements have interesting transfer credits such as Military Science as a course at Riverside Military academy.

Individual:

Allocations of how schools are funding girl’s programs compared to boys
Allocations of how schools are funding girl’s basketball, soccer and track and field as the largest sports in the GHSA.

Records to Get

Team project

Jeff Herron’s history as a head coach & his former assistants’ records as head coaches – Available via GHSFHA
FOIA emails between the Grayson athletic director and Herron
Stories pertinent to finding out how many Herron assistants have become head coaches – Online newspaper databases
Herron’s contract with Grayson High School

Individual project

Records of all of Georgia’s state playoff teams in the last five years – GHSFHA
Created database featuring a particular coach’s time at school, time as a head coach overall, winning percentage leading into the playoff season and prior playoff appearances
Contract information concerning some of the coaches that fall into the average

Potential Records

Personal story

none

All of the hard data (career games played, PER, college statistics, past NBA draft results) I need for my story is publicly available, via NBA.com/stats and basketball-reference.com. The pool of players I’m looking at is pretty big: players drafted from 2003 – 2011 (they have >5 years worth of NBA Data to look at; avg. NBA career is 4.8 years).

Team story:

current team rosters (e.g , Grayson)
Transfer migration patterns in GA high schools

High school records can be hard to track, but we’ve already started compiling a list of local HS football transfer transfers to contact. We may need to file open records request to know the amount of transfers (within GHSA) over the last few years; some patterns may emerge once we parse the data (like if there’s an area or school most transfers are leaving)

Open records to get

Individual project:

Basic demographic info about Clarkston High School students
- How many nations are represented?
- How many students were not born in the United States?
- How many students are refugees? How many students have parents who were refugees?
Immigration policies, laws
Numerical data for how many refugees have resettled in Georgia, how does that compare to other states?
Census information for comprehensive look at the makeup of Clarkston

The information about the high school sounds like it would be easily obtained through school employees. When I talked with the principal last week, it sounded like this is information she would be able to get for me. For information about the city, I believe I could go through the city government to get these data and records.

Team project:

The forms/paperwork required to transfer in order to see what type information an athlete has to provide and if the reasoning for switching schools is included
Historical records of how many high school students transfer each year with information that includes the school they left and the school they moved to.
Information or paperwork from the decision-making process if there have ever been instances where a player is not granted eligibility at a new school
This is less so a record as it is a stat, but it would probably involve getting some historical data from GHSA. I’d like to see how the parity between the best teams and the worst teams and see if this is the result of an influx of transfers. For example, maybe a while ago a majority of teams fluctuated around 0.35-0.65 win proportions. But I wonder if the good teams have gotten better while the bad teams have gotten worse, which would show higher numbers of teams at the low end and the high end with fewer in the middle. Even if this is the case, it would be hard to attribute it to the increase in transfers who leave to find better teams.

I believe all of this information would be somewhat easily obtainable through GHSA. I’d assume that they keep a database of athletes who participate in sports, and they probably have the paperwork needed to transfer on file somewhere.

Records in need

Team:

How many players transferred over X amount of years
If any players transferred in or out of one school more so than another
If there was an influx of players into a particular school after a coaching change
Which schools have won the most championships in X amount of years and if they have had a significant number of transfers

We could probably acquire these records from GHSA. I’m sure that there must be a record kept of every transfer because you need to fill out forms to do so

Individual:

The number of men and women playing lacrosse in college
How many students playing college lacrosse are from Georgia
The percentage of lacrosse teams that are and that are not made up of in-state students

I’m not exactly sure how to come across this information. I don’t know if the NCAA keeps records of where players or from and I highly doubt many schools would, especially the smaller ones.