On a Saturday in October 2010, the Georgia Dome — the 71,250-seat facility that hosted NFL games, SEC Championships, and Super Bowls — belonged to eight high school football teams from Atlanta and the surrounding metro area. Domecoming, in its second year, was the creation of Jeff Beggs, athletic director for the City of Atlanta Schools, who had a straightforward idea: give Atlanta's public school athletes the experience of playing in a professional stadium, and give downtown Atlanta a reason to celebrate its neighborhoods' teams.
The lineup paired five Atlanta public schools — South Atlanta, Carver, Washington, Douglass, and Mays — against three metro-area opponents: Lovett, Dunwoody, and Druid Hills. Games ran from 11:00 a.m. through 8:00 p.m., creating a full day of football in a venue where most of these athletes would never otherwise play.
The Parade
Washington High School planned the most ambitious pregame of the day: a homecoming parade that marched the school's band and alumni from the campus to the Georgia Dome, straight down Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Fans tailgated along the route, turning the march into a community celebration that extended the event's footprint from the Dome into the surrounding neighborhoods. The parade connected two versions of Atlanta — the institutional downtown of professional stadiums and convention centers, and the residential communities whose students were the reason the event existed.
Building Something New
The first Domecoming in 2009 had drawn approximately 13,000 attendees. For the second year, organizers targeted 15,000, bolstered by enhanced production: matrix boards and ribbon boards throughout the Georgia Dome, professional-grade game presentation, and a schedule designed to keep fans in the building across multiple games.
The concept addressed a specific gap in Atlanta's relationship with its public schools. The city's professional sports teams — the Falcons, Hawks, Braves — dominated the conversation about athletics in Atlanta. High school football, despite its cultural significance in Georgia, rarely received the kind of venue, production, or public attention that Domecoming provided. Beggs's innovation was using the infrastructure that already existed downtown — the Georgia Dome, the parking, the transit connections — and redirecting it toward the community that lived closest to it.
Downtown's Role
Domecoming turned the Georgia Dome into a community facility rather than a commercial one. For one day, the 71,000-seat stadium served the same purpose as a neighborhood field — a place where families watched their kids play football — at a scale that made the ordinary feel extraordinary. The bands were louder. The field was bigger. The jumbotron showed replays of plays that would otherwise exist only in the memories of the people who were there.
The event demonstrated something about downtown Atlanta that the SEC Championship and the Falcons schedule could not: that the district's venues could serve the city's own communities, not just the visitors who flew in from elsewhere. Domecoming was downtown for downtown's people.
Original reporting by Georgia Public Broadcasting, October 13, 2010.