RON SEIBEL: In his 45th season, start of football still excites Tommy Whittle

In 45 years of working with high school athletes, Tommy Whittle hasn’t lost his knack for the one-liner.

A native of Wilcox County, Whittle spent 23 years as a basketball coach in Georgia, winning 602 games and two state championships, and coached in multiple sports. He then went into administration, working for several years in the GISA office before joining the GHSA in 2013 as its associate director in charge of football, soccer, one-act play and literary.

“It’s still fun,” Whittle told the Exchange Club of Albany at its weekly meeting Friday. “It’s still fun to get up in the morning and see these kids. I think it keeps you young when you’re with these kids all the time.”

Whittle will be on his toes from now until the state football finals in early December.

If something goes haywire on a Friday night during football season, whether it’s having to scramble to find an officiating crew for a rescheduled game to having to deal with an unsporting act, he’s the person at the state office in Thomaston who will handle it.

This is where his wit becomes quite useful.

“If somebody calls the GHSA office, it gives my phone number in case somebody really needs to get in touch with me,” Whittle said. “Usually, if games start at 7:30, by 7:40 some mother has called me and told me, ‘These are the worst officials I have ever seen in my life.’ And I say, ‘No, ma’am, you must be mistaken, because they’re at nine other places.’ “

The weather being what it is during the fall in Georgia — from thunderstorms to hurricanes to, as seen at the state finals last year, snow — Whittle is often called upon to help assemble officiating crews when one officials’ association can’t cover all the games happening in its assigned area.

“We had a hurricane come through,” Whittle said in describing an effort to put an officiating crew together for a rescheduled game. “We had one game last year where I found out on Thursday night at 10 o’clock that the white hat, or referee, didn’t have a softball game the next afternoon because one team swept. I had two side judges that had never called a varsity football game from another association. I had an umpire from another association, two back judges from two different associations and a clock operator from another association.”

Whittle had another well-timed one-liner about how that turned out.

“I still haven’t gotten my first call about how bad they were,” he said, jokingly.

Whittle brings a rural southwest Georgia perspective to a governing body that covers a diverse state. While he lives in Thomaston, location of the GHSA headquarters, he still owns property down this way.

Service organization lunches? He’s right at home.

“You need to be nicer to me than you are to Robin, because I’m related,” Whittle told the Exchange Club meeting, jokingly, in reference to GHSA executive director Robin Hines, himself a former teacher and coach in Dougherty County. “I had this uncle who was really quiet, shy and reserved that was a member of this august body.

“Before I moved to Thomaston 21 years ago, Uncle Butch got me to bring 100 rabbits over here for the fair. My station wagon was packed with rabbits right and left. My daughter showed rabbits.”

While high school athletics associations are often seen as some big monolith, that’s not the case in Georgia. There are only 14 employees in the GHSA office in Thomaston who handle day-to-day operations, a setup that leaves much of the decision-making to Board of Trustees and Executive Committee members who work at member schools.

Those who work in Thomaston are the go-betweens to help keep things running smoothly. And Whittle is more than happy to fill that role.

“Wednesday morning was the first day of football practice with pads on in Georgia,” Whittle said. “I’m already getting butterflies for Aug. 16, when we start the first actual games.”

Contact sports editor Ron Seibel at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @RonSeibel.