ALBANY - His roots are in Florida, but Johnny Seabrooks' life has been right here in Albany, where the Good Life City has been even better since he arrived.

 

Seabrooks, who was born and raised in Montecello, Fla., has dug both his feet - and his heart - into the Georgia clay, where he spent 28 years coaching in high schools and 40 years in one capacity or another overseeing high school athletes.

 

On Monday night, Seabrooks will be inducted into the Albany Sports Hall of Fame, and many feel it's long overdue for a man who has given his life to the youth of Southwest Georgia and specifically to Dougherty County.

 

"It's an honor, a great honor,'' said Seabrooks as he conducted an interview with The Herald Friday, rushing between the college signing of Westover distance runner Ericka Taylor and overseeing physicals for the county.

 

The man who is synonymous with track & field in Albany seems to always be on the run.

 

He has been the Dougherty County Director of Athletics since 2002 as a long winding road brought him to his current position - a road that started when Seabrooks arrived here as a coach after starting out in Brooks County, where he ran a one-man recreational facility from the back of his Volkswagen as a roving physical education teacher in Quitman and later as a legendary coach in the Dougherty County school district at both Monroe and Dougherty high schools. Read more...

Emily DeMaio - Marist 

AP Scholar(11th Grade), Bronze Award on National Spanish Exam, Columbia University Book Award(11th Grade), Dean's List(9th Grade-Present), Georgia Certificate of Merit(11th Grade), Marist School Award(10th Grade), Mu Alpha Theta(11th-12th Grades), National Honor Society(11th-12th Grades), Spanish National Honor Society(11th-12th Grades)

Basketball (Varsity 4 years) Team Captain (12th Grade), Team Chaplain (10th-11th Grade), Defensive Captain (11th Grade), Lady War Eagle Award (11th Grade), Scholar Athlete Award (12th Grade)), Comeback Award (12th Grade), Track and Field (Varsity 4 years), School Shotput Record Holder (10th  (Shotput and Discus), Coach's Award (10th), Team Chaplain (12th), Volleyball (JV),Co-Captain (10th Grade)

John Williams now realizes how close Ocean Lakes High School in Virginia Beach, Va., came to being sued for violating a student-athlete's First Amendment rights. After two photographs of the girl with a shot glass appeared on Facebook several years ago, an anonymous email was sent to the team's coach with the photos in question and these words: "Is this the kind of student-athlete you promote at your school?"

"We didn't know where it came from; it could have been sour grapes from a teammate," says Williams, student activities coordinator at Ocean Lakes, who forwarded the email to the school's principal after the coach forwarded it to him. "But we called in the young lady, told her how disappointed we were and then dismissed her from the team. Knowing what I know now, if she and her parents had challenged that decision in court, we probably would have lost. And that disturbs me."

What Williams knows now is that the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District defined the free-speech rights of public school students when it ruled that administrators may limit First Amendment rights only when the speech (or in today's world, the post) substantially disrupts the school environment. Almost 45 years later, that ruling remains the standard.

"I think we did the right thing. But what we thought was the right thing and what was actually enforceable by the law were different, because there was no real disruption," says Williams, who last fall introduced an expansive social media position statement that incorporates specifically prohibited behaviors such as cyberbullying and the posting of sexually explicit, profane, lewd, indecent, illegal or defamatory comments or photos, as well as social media guidelines to help student-athletes make smart decisions. (Those guidelines apparently were established by St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Dover, N.H., and used by Williams with permission.)

Adopted by the Beach District Principals' Association for all 11 district high schools, the position statement is "probably the most detailed one I've seen at the high school level," says Lee Green, an attorney specializing in sports law who also is a professor of business and economics at Baker University. "Maybe 20 percent of high schools in the country actually have included a social media policy in their student-athlete codes of conduct. But it's increasing all the time. As more and more problems pop up around the country, athletic directors are becoming aware of the need to incorporate a policy." Read more...