With the start of the new school year comes what many see as the centerpiece of fall in Georgia: Football!

I have lived in Georgia through more than 45 football seasons, 13 of them as a high school football coach. Growing up where cool weather usually came with the first game of the season, I have yet to come to terms with the heat that smothers our state July through September and often later.

But there is more happening in that land of my youth than the start of football. The 85-year-old Toledo (Ohio) City League will be disbanded in 2011. A mix of public and private schools, the only such league in Ohio and a rarity nationwide, the City League will be forced to close when the five Catholic high schools and one public school form a new league. Member schools, which numbered 16 in 1988, will now be six. Previously, three of the city’s public high schools, including the one in my neighborhood, have already gone out of existence in the past 20 years as each school’s student population has dwindled from 1,500 to 2,000 to several hundred.

The league’s collapse has touched most high schools in that part of northwestern Ohio as they attempt to form new leagues, aiming at more parity and less travel.

However, that is just part of the story.

Failure of a tax levy in May led to funding cuts affecting not only City League football and basketball. Six middle schools will have no athletic program at all. Toledo public high schools will also end all freshman-level sports as well as the varsity sports of cross country, golf, boys’ tennis, wrestling and hockey.

Such drastic actions, of course, are not limited to Toledo. Similar decisions are being made in dozens of school systems nationwide.

Can it happen here?

Organizationally, Georgia is different. Georgia schools are organized into eight regions with five classifications. There are no leagues as such. Schools are assigned a region by geography and a class (A through AAAAA) by attendance.

Financially, all of you are aware of the funding problems af- fecting schools state-wide. Furloughs, a shortened school year, loss of pay increases, loss of teaching positions, elimination of music and art, these and more are witness.

Will cuts in athletics similar to those in Northwest Ohio come to our state? Have they already? Are areas in Georgia being forced to look at the elimination of some varsity, freshman and/or middle school athletic programs?

Coaches and administrators are well aware of the vulnerability of some high school athletic programs. But neither they nor I venture to predict the outcome.