Mary G. Montgomery’s appeal to have its restrictive probation and one-year football playoff ban overturned has been rejected by the Alabama High School Athletic Association’s District I board, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the decision.
The ruling, handed down Wednesday, keeps the postseason ban and related sanctions fully in place for the Vikings as they head into the 2026 season. It is not yet clear whether Mary G. Montgomery will exercise its right to take the matter further to the AHSAA’s Central Board of Control, which holds the final word on any appeal. Mobile County Public School System officials have not said publicly what the district’s next step will be.
The District I ruling is the second of the three possible stops in the AHSAA’s appeals architecture. Each of the association’s nine districts maintains a local board that hears first-level appeals from member schools; a school that loses there may carry the case to the Central Board of Control, the statewide governing body whose decisions are final. Skipping a level, or arriving at one without new information, tends to doom an appeal — which is why the Wednesday result matters: whatever MGM argues at the Central Board, it will be arguing against a fresh local defeat.
The stakes are concrete. A restrictive probation means the program operates under AHSAA monitoring, with any further rule violation risking escalated penalties, while the postseason ban removes the 2026 playoffs from the table no matter what the team does on the field. For a program that rebuilt itself into a perennial region contender, a season without a postseason is a season without the payoff the rebuild was for.
A familiar result for Pell City
Mary G. Montgomery was not alone in receiving bad news Wednesday. Pell City’s football program, which was hit with a nearly identical set of penalties earlier this year, saw its own appeal to the District 6 board rejected by a 3-1 vote.
Unlike Mobile County officials, however, Pell City Athletic Director Harley Ramey confirmed the Panthers intend to take their case to the Central Board.
The parallel cases, arriving at their district boards in the same week, are likely to shape how the Central Board views both. Pell City’s announced intention to appeal gives the statewide body two nearly identical sanction packages to review at once — a circumstance that invites comparison of the underlying facts, the consistency of the penalties and, not least, the procedural fairness of the local boards that heard them first.
One notable difference between the two cases: Pell City coach Jake Ganus was suspended for a year by the AHSAA but kept his job, while Vikings coach Zach Golson was not retained by the school after his suspension was handed down.
That distinction cuts in different directions. Pell City’s choice to retain its suspended coach means the program’s day-to-day leadership survives the penalty and resumes when the suspension ends. MGM’s decision to part ways with Golson removed the school’s ability to argue, at appeal, that its house was already in order — but it also aligned the school with the association’s own judgment that the violations warranted a change in leadership, a stance that can weigh in a school’s favor when the Central Board weighs mitigation.
Questions about the District I board’s makeup
The District I board that heard and rejected MGM’s appeal is made up of Blount Principal Jerome Woods, Alma Bryant coach Bart Sessions, former Foley coach Deric Scott and Fairhope coach Caleb Ross.
Several of those board members have ties to Mary G. Montgomery’s Class 7A, Region 1 rivals. Sessions and Ross both coach teams in the Vikings’ region, Scott is the brother of Baker coach Eric Scott, whose team is also in that region, and Woods serves as principal of a school with attendance zones that overlap MGM’s.
Those relationships raise the question — unproven, but unavoidable — of whether the board that judged MGM could rule on it at arm’s length. In a region as competitive as 7A, Region 1, every school in the region benefits directly when a rival sits out a postseason: the playoff bracket opens, region standings soften and a rival’s recruiting taint stops being a recruiting advantage. Members of a district board drawn from the same region face that conflict by design, since Alabama’s districts are geographic and the board members are, by definition, neighboring school officials. Whether MGM raises the makeup of the board in any Central Board filing will depend on how Mobile County chooses to frame its final appeal.
Eighth graders ruled ineligible
Part of the underlying case against Mary G. Montgomery centered on a group of eighth graders who had attended an annual freshman welcoming ceremony at the school before officially moving into its attendance zone.
Sources say those students have been ruled permanently ineligible for athletics at MGM as a result.
The eligibility question sits at the heart of the recruiting rule. Alabama’s association treats contact with students who have not yet entered the school’s zone — middle schoolers being courted, formally or informally, before their assignment is fixed — as the definition of proselytizing. A welcoming ceremony extended to eighth graders from outside the zone, however innocent its intent, put MGM’s hospitality in exactly the category the rule prohibits, and the association’s response treats the damage as permanent: those students will never be eligible in Vikings uniforms.
For the students themselves, the ruling is the harshest consequence in the whole file. They are being sanctioned for a decision made by adults — an invitation from a school, attendance at a ceremony — before they had any official standing at MGM. The permanent character of the penalty means it follows them for their entire high school careers, with no path back to eligibility through good behavior or changed circumstances.
Where the case stands
Wednesday’s ruling follows a separate decision in late July, when the AHSAA’s Central Board took no formal action after hearing a presentation from MGM Principal David Diaz outlining the steps the school has taken to remain in compliance going forward.
That presentation was described by the school system at the time as informational rather than a formal appeal hearing, with district officials saying MGM’s true appeal would need to go before the local District I board — the appeal that was rejected this week.
The July episode helps explain the school’s position now. MGM presented its compliance story to the Central Board and was told, in effect, that the story belonged at the district level first. Having now lost at the district level, the school’s compliance record — the reforms Diaz outlined, the personnel changes, the tightened controls — is the principal remaining card it can play, and playing it means betting that the Central Board weighs mitigation even after two bodies have declined to lift the sanctions.
Background on the sanctions
The AHSAA ruled in May that Mary G. Montgomery committed recruiting violations, resulting in a restrictive probation period, a one-year postseason ban for the 2026 season and a one-year coaching suspension for then-head coach Zach Golson.
Golson was placed on paid administrative leave on May 4 and escorted off campus without being allowed to address his players or staff. He has since lost his position with the program, which is now led by former defensive coordinator Alex Page on a permanent basis.
Golson’s exit closed out a rebuilding effort that had turned Mary G. Montgomery into one of the state’s more respected Class 7A programs. He inherited a team in 2022 that had posted the worst record in the classification’s history and went on to compile a 37-10 overall record with two region championships in four seasons, including a 31-5 mark over his final three years and a 23-3 record in region play across his last four seasons.
The arc of that record is what makes the sanctions land so hard. The worst-to-first transformation in Semmes — from a program at the bottom of the state’s largest classification to a two-time region champion — is exactly the kind of turnaround that attracts scrutiny, because in Alabama high school football such recoveries are usually built on players. The association’s May ruling concluded that some of the players arrived improperly, and the penalty structure it chose was designed to strip the program of the postseason returns those players were recruited to produce.
Looking ahead to kickoff
Even with a Central Board appeal still theoretically possible, the team will take the field this fall carrying the full weight of its sanctions unless that changes.
Despite the unresolved appeal process, Mary G. Montgomery’s season is still set to open as scheduled on Friday, Aug. 21, when the Vikings host Saraland.