With Kickoff Classic invite, Pike Road football may experience financial issues
Taking the invitation to play in the annual Kickoff Classic have put coach Granger Shook and the Pike Road Patriots in a bind financially with just three ‘true’ home games. (File photo)
By TIM GAYLE
PIKE ROAD -- The annual Kickoff Classic found a great matchup with Prattville playing Pike Road on Aug. 21 at Cramton Bowl, but the decision stole a much-needed home game away from the Patriots.
The season opener with nearby Prattville would have provided the biggest gate of the season for the Patriots, but now leaves Pike Road with just three home games -- and two of them may not be strong attractions, creating a financial bind for any program that relies on football to help bankroll the other sports in a high school program.
A home game allows teams to make money off of ticket sales, concessions and parking, but a neutral-site matchup such as the Kickoff Classic only allows Pike Road to receive a percentage of the ticket sales. Pike Road coach Granger Shook, however, believes the big gate attraction of Pike Road-Prattville will help offset the loss of the home game.
“I do believe the split at Cramton Bowl will financially be good enough to help in some of those areas,” Shook said. “We are expecting a big gate there.”
The Patriots will follow up the second week of the season with a home game against Enterprise, the second biggest gate of the season, but then hosts Rehobeth -- a school located more than 160 miles southeast of Pike Road -- and has to wait five more weeks before playing its final home game against Stanhope Elmore.
By then, a disappointing record in the first seven weeks for either Pike Road or Stanhope Elmore could affect the gate.
“We do have a lot of ‘away’ games,” Shook said. “However, Wetumpka is a 30-minute drive; Percy Julian is a 20-minute drive; Park Crossing is a 20-minute drive. Three of those home games are local. Our kids have played in Cramton Bowl before. We’re going to play in Cramton Bowl a lot.”
One way to offset the lack of home games is to pay a school to move its home game to Pike Road. The most logical candidates are smaller schools (Pike Road travels to Class 5A Charles Henderson on Oct. 30) and those that don’t typically draw a lot of fans, which would be either of the two MPS schools on the schedule.
The game with Park Crossing on Oct. 2 is a Thursday night game. A better option would be the Julian game, set for a Saturday at 6 p.m. on Sept. 20.
The opportunity to purchase another home game “has come across our desk, but that’s not going to be the case,” Shook said. “With us only having three home games, I can’t afford to buy a game right now.”
Despite losing its home-field advantage with just three home games in 2025, Shook doesn’t expect that obstacle to play any significant role in the Patriots’ drive for a championship.
“I like this football team for a lot of reasons,” he said. “The first reason is they’re just good kids and they’ve bought into what we as a staff are preaching. I think this team is very connected -- our mantra is ‘connection over perfection’ -- and they are winners. We have a lot of good players. We don’t care where we play, we don’t care who we play.”