If your coaching staff has been letting knee pads slide (despite the warning from officials), officials with the Georgia High School Athletic Association are telling you that window is closing.
In an email sent to athletic directors and head football coaches across the state, GHSA executive director Tim Scott laid out a renewed point of emphasis on football uniform compliance for the 2026 season, with knee pads the star of that communication. The message is short on gray area and long on follow-through, and has the backing of the NFHS we're told.
Per the memo, football pants must be worn as designed and in accordance with NFHS rules, and knee pads are required to be worn in their proper position covering the knee. Scott spells out the workarounds coaches and players have quietly leaned on for years, and shuts each one down. Knee pads may not be tucked underneath the pants, rolled up, pulled up above the knee, cut, altered, or modified in any way. So those old school kneepads that players just cut into the smallest possible circles? Those aren't going to cut it anymore, at least in Georgia.
Pants also can't be altered from their intended design to get around the requirement either.
None of that is new at the rulebook level. NFHS rules already require that pants completely cover the knees and that knee pads be worn over the knee, and unaltered knee pads must be at least half an inch thick, or three-eighths of an inch if made of shock absorbing material. Instead of constant warnings and conversations about it in your pregame meeting with the officials working the game, Georgia is preparing some enforcement.
Scott outlined a progressive discipline process for schools found in violation. A first offense brings a written warning. A second offense means a fine assessed to the member school. Third and subsequent offenses carry additional fines and disciplinary action as determined by the GHSA. Officials have been instructed to monitor pants and pads during their pregame duties and flag violations through their game reports, so this won't live and die on whether a crew feels like making it an issue on a given Friday night.
This is now a conversation for staffs and players to have before the first day of preseason practice, not something to sort out in the tunnel before Week 1 and then worry about getting a call from your AD the week after your game when your school has been hit with a fine.
Scott specifically asked programs that the information be reviewed with coaching staffs, equipment managers, and student-athletes ahead of camp and throughout the season.
Scott, who took over as GHSA executive director in July 2024 after succeeding the retired Robin Hines, framed the emphasis around player safety and NFHS compliance rather than aesthetics. Properly fitted and properly worn equipment, he wrote, is essential in reducing injury risk.
The knee pad debate isn't unique to Georgia, and NFHS has kept equipment enforcement on its radar nationally in recent years. But Georgia is now attaching real accountability to it, and that tends to change behavior faster than those reminders ever will.
Coaches have chimed in with concerns pointed at the uniform retailers for having pants that don't fit properly, especially when you have a 6'5 180lb kid who needs a small in the waist, but the length of a large.
See the full email, shared via @FiredCoaches, below.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for more.
