Last Friday night, South Gwinnett defeated Brookwood 44-14 for their 1st win of the HS Football season. More importantly for the Comets, the win was their unprecedented 3rd straight over the Broncos in the and 4th in the last 6 seasons. The “Battle of Snellville” may still mean something to the teams over 30 years after it first began, but it doesn’t come close to how personal it once was.
It was established as a natural rivalry. South Gwinnett, just east of downtown Snellville on US 78, was one of the original four Gwinnett County Public High School, built in the late 1950s from the same template as Central Gwinnett, North Gwinnett, and West Gwinnett (later Norcross). It had thin, darkened hallways. Smallish classrooms. It had grown over time, but was 6 separate buildings loosely linked together. Covered walkways would not be added until the late 1980s. The Blue and Grey school gave the appearance of a blue-collar school.
Contrast with Brookwood, located on the NW side of town. The Maroon & Gold prototype of the New Gwinnett County Public High Schools of the 1980s (Shiloh & Meadowcreek would follow using largely the same blueprint as Brookwood). Everything under one roof. Cafeteria, Auditorium, Gymnasium, wide well-lit hallways, Large Classrooms… was missing some Athletic Fields for the first 10 years or so, but they were eventually added. And that area had parents with money—or at least appeared to have more money than the rest of Snellville.
To understand why the rivalry used to be so personal, you have to go back to its birth. Snellville still thought of itself as a small town in the late 1970s and early 1980s—around the time my family moved into the growing community. The motto “Where Everybody is Somebody” genuinely meant something to the people of the town. The city went to the same schools (Britt Elementary, Snellville Middle, South Gwinnett HS), would shop in the same stores, would eat at the same restaurants, would play the same kids’ sports, would worship in the same churches (except for outliers like my family who were the Lutheran oddballs in a Baptist/United Methodist dominated community, but you get the idea)… In short, dividing the community was not something to be taken lightly. And yet, that’s exactly what happened, starting in the fall of 1981, when that new HS first appeared at the corner of Hollybook and Dogwood...
Because of how close the town was, everybody at least knew somebody close who were lining up on the opposite side of High Schools starting in 1981. We had gone to Britt Elementary and Snellville Middle together, and we had become friends with so many people who ended up on the other side that when we had to face each other, it felt more like a family feud than a true enemy. And though the lines were clearly drawn, they were blurred on a daily basis of life, because we all eventually had to go to the same places. Because the cluster system of GCPS still had yet been established in the early days, you would have these scenarios of friends ultimately get separated between Blue & Grey and Maroon & Gold when it came time to go to High School. Much in the same way that kids who grew up at Centerville Elementary & Grayson Elementary got split up when it was Middle School Time, or what would happen later on when Richards Middle School first came on line and fed into both Brookwood and Central Gwinnett High Schools.
I’ll give you my personal example… When my family first moved to Snellville in 1979, we had heard rumors that GCPS were going to add a new HS in the Snellville area to relieve overcrowding. This was just 3 years after Parkview HS came online as the 8th Public HS in Gwinnett County just 3 years earlier (there are now 18 Public HS). For whatever reason, my parents wanted to make sure that we did not go into the new Public HS, so they chose a house on the more affordable NE side of town, which kept us firmly entrenched on the South Gwinnett side of Snellville. But, my dad knew faculty members who were coming on board to the new HS (most notably Principal Emmitt Lawson and Assistant Principal Dan Chelko, who left the same positions at Britt Elementary when the new HS came), so in a weird masochistic way, my dad and I would often interact with the “new school” throughout our lives in town. I attended multiple Eddie Martin Basketball Camps. In High School, my dad and I would actually help Coach Berry’s Annual Brookwood Scholar’s Bowl Tournaments. Heck, I got treated better by the arch-rival Scholar’s Bowl Coach than my own Scholar’s Bowl Coach.
Those early years were hard, particularly for the old grey lady of South. More times than not, the younger rival would get the better of the Comets. There was actually a stretch of time where a kid could have started elementary school at Britt as a Kindergarten student, and graduated from South Gwinnett High School having never seen the Comets beat the Brookwood Broncos in Football. It wasn’t just football, though. Brookwood generally had the more athletic teams, on average had the smarter students, and got more of the state & national recognition for being one of the best public high schools around. But one thing I will always give the Comets credit for… the eternal optimism that my South Friends and I had. And occasionally, we got the better of our younger rivals in sports and academics.
As time wore on, however, a number of factors began to slowly eliminate the chance for rival schools to interact with each other—in particular, South and Brookwood. First, GCPS realized that having the kids getting separated from Elementary & Middle Schools into different High Schools often had a negative impact on the kids. So in time, the school began to form clusters. 3-4 elementary schools would feed a single middle school and one high school. That way, friends could be kept together. In the years that followed, the model would be readjusted to add a middle school to the cluster as well as 1-2 more elementary schools. So you didn’t have to have friendships with kids who eventually became arch-rivals.
Another thing that helped eliminate the interaction was the growth of grocery stores and restaurants around middle and high school areas. In a way, the schools became their own communities or village. Because it was near downtown Snellville, South Gwinnett already had major stores, doctor’s offices, and banks near its campus, so it had its own village by default. Brookwood would get their own village established late in the 1980s and early 1990s around the Five Forks areas. When you didn’t have to go 10 minutes to the downtown Snellville Kroger’s or Winn-Dixie and instead could shop at the one in the Five Forks area closer to where you lived, it made a difference for Bronco families—and reduced interaction with their Snellville rivals significantly.
A third thing that change was that both schools underwent massive transformations--none more so dramatic than South. A decade ago, the Comets embarked on a massive reconstruction effort that demolished the old one-level classroom halls and raised up a new multi-story campus that matched the glamour of its rival. Brookwood, too, has had to renovate, now that the school is in its middle 30s in age, but nowhere near what South has done. The student body has changed too—more so at South. South is now about two-thirds African-American. A generation ago, the thought of a 96% Caucasian school changing race demographics that rapidly would have been unthinkable. Brookwood has also changed race dynamics, but at a much more glacial pace. Wealth appears to be a factor in that pace.
But the fourth and most important thing that has changed about South v. Brookwood was that Snellville got big—really big. So big that the town motto really doesn’t fit anymore. So big that neither school could accommodate all the new students entering the system. As a result, another school entered the Snellville landscape in the late 1990s. Grayson High School came on line in 1999, and its cluster sheared off the NE side of Snellville that once served as the main dividing line between South & Brookwood. With that main border now in the hands of a third school, new rivalries were formed and the fierceness of the old rivalry lost a good chunk of its luster. South and Brookwood still share a small border with each other, but because of the factors I have mentioned, the two schools don’t have to interact with each other the way its younger versions had to.
The South-Brookwood rivalry will never be as personal as it once was. Many of the people who were there in the beginning are long gone, replaced by younger generations who know little about how the rivalry came to be or who interact with each other on a regular basis. That is one aspect, much like the old downtown Snellville, that has disappeared and will not return. In time, however, as the dynamics change and the student bodies get smaller, these schools may even be forced to merge. It won’t happen for at least another two generations—but I may yet see it happen before I die. I wonder how that would go over in Snellville.
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