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When 19-year-old business school graduate Lora Bickley began a professional career at the Virginia High School League office in Charlottesville on Aug. 25, 1969, her self-described job title was “Girl Friday.”
As she prepares to leave the VHSL on Friday after 55 years of service, Bickley will forever be known as “Girl Friday Night.”
The Central Virginia native has handled a variety of responsibilities in five-plus decades with the organization that oversees the extracurricular activities of 318 Virginia high schools, but her most visible contribution has been largely anonymous.
The VHSL issues several highly anticipated items: all-state teams, tournament brackets, the master football schedule, and alignment and enrollment figures among the foremost.
But during a six-week period in the fall, the numbers that prep football coaches, players and fans hunger and thirst far beyond all others are the VHSL ratings that determine postseason qualification and seeding.
Some call them playoff points.
Some call them power points.
Officially, the numbers released following games of Week 6 through the end of the regular season are known as the VHSL Rating Scale.
And since 1986 without fail, Bickley has computed them all.
Her retirement is significant, and no, she is not changing her mind.
The VHSL office will compute and publish the weekly results this fall beginning in early October. However, here is some news: The VHSL office is getting out of the points business.
Beginning in 2025, the league office is handing the duty to each of the VHSL’s 24 regions. Also, each region can develop its own rating system, similar to the way they already determine qualification and seeding for other sports.
VHSL communications director Mike McCall said the VHSL will publish its ratings, but only if the regions provide the standings to the league office.
Bickley? She will retire to her home in Louisa County, take a trip abroad, sign up for a chair yoga class, lead her church’s Bible study, spend more time with her granddaughters and maybe wonder just where did those 55 years go.
* * *
Bickley graduated from Orange County High School in 1968. Lyndon Johnson was president of the United States, and Neil Armstrong had not yet stepped foot on the moon.
She attended business school at Jefferson Professional Institute in Charlottesville. Upon graduation, an instructor at the school who knew the treasurer of the VHSL heard about an employment opportunity across town with the league.
The teacher had a student in mind, and Bickley still recalls the prophetic words:
“She said, ‘I have the perfect job for you.'”
There’s no argument coming from coworkers past and present.
Much of Bickley’s 12-month duties involve organizing and detailing the agenda of the VHSL executive committee, the administrative governing body of the league composed largely of school superintendents, principals and athletic directors from throughout the state.
She also works with the VHSL’s sanctioning of in-season tournaments and officials’ education. Bickley also monitors the schedule of VHSL Executive Director Billy Haun, who took the job in 2016.
“You’re talking about a lady that’s got 55 years of experience,” Haun began. “I can say, ‘Lora, what year did that policy get adopted?’ She’ll say, ‘I think it was 1992. Let me go look. No, it was ’93.’
“She remembers when items were on the agenda, when they were voted in, when they were changed. Nine times out of 10, she’s exactly right.”
Bickley knows dates. She might even know who your kids or grandkids are dating.
“She knows everybody’s family. She knows everybody’s name. And she’s so smart. She knows everything,” said Sharon Condoulis, activities program assistant for VHSL. “She keeps the league together. A lot of the things she does are critical to every school. She works with all these things that affect everybody.”
And when not everyone is always completely happy with the VHSL, Bickley sometimes might pick up a ringing office telephone with an angry — OK, belligerent — caller on the line.
“One time, some guy called up and started cussing. I mean, swearing,” said Haun, who certainly heard his share of salty language as a head football coach at George Wythe-Wytheville, Richlands, Caroline and Western Albemarle high schools. “She said, ‘Sir, I’m going to end this conversation now.’ She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t slam the phone down. Most [people] when somebody starts cussing, you want to keep your composure, but sometimes you don’t.
“I leave my door open all the time. She can hear my conversations on the phone. I can hear hers. In the nine years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen her get flustered enough to raise her voice.”
Bickley was inducted into the Virginia High School Hall of Fame in 2011. In his letter of recommendation to the selection committee, former VHSL Executive Director Ken Tilley wrote this:
“There could have been no better ambassador for the Virginia High School League over the years than Lora Bickley.”
* * *
The calculations on the VHSL Rating Scale are an amalgamated algorithm of arithmetic analyzed annually by an assortment of amateur assimilators anxious to at least approximate the absolute values of what is known as Lora Bickley’s art.
The formula that appears on page 135 of the VHSL Handbook has evolved over time and actually is difficult to master only for those who don’t understand it.
That can be easier said than done, however, for the uninitiated.
It goes like this:
Teams earn points for on-field results in a maximum of 10 regular-season games. A team gets 26 points for defeating a Class 6 opponent, 24 for Class 5, 22 for Class 4, 20 for Class 3, 18 for Class 2 and 16 for Class 1.
A team gets 14 points if it loses to a Class 6 opponent, 12 for Class 5, 10 for Class 4, eight for Class 3, six for Class 2 and four for Class 1.
Additionally, in an attempt to not penalize a larger school for scheduling a smaller opponent, two bonus points are awarded to the bigger school for each difference in classification between the two schools.
Also, rider points are awarded in the following manner:
Each game won by a defeated opponent earns a team two extra points. Each game won by an opponent a team lost to earns one extra point.
The total number of points accumulated divided by the number of official games played produces a Rating Scale average. Within each region, the average determines which teams qualify for the playoffs and their respective seedings.
There are some caveats. Games against boarding schools do not count as a game played on the Rating Scale and do not earn a team any points. Games against private schools and out-of-state schools count, but only if the opponent is a bona fide member of its respective state association and is not a boarding school.
Criteria are in place for breaking ties, as was the case in 2023 when Salem and Jefferson Forest were deadlocked at the top of the Region 4D standings with 299 points in 10 games for a 29.90 average.
The deciding factor was the fourth tiebreaker on the list, the Rating Scale average of each team’s 10 opponents. Salem got the nod by a whisker, 22.92 to 22.66.
Amateur sleuths trying to get a jump on the VHSL numbers often post their own figures in emails, blogs or other sites. Mostly they are correct. Sometimes they are wrong.
Sometimes Bickley needs outside help. Perhaps a score was reported backwards. Perhaps a forfeit occurred out of state. Perhaps a team added a game to its schedule at the last minute.
However, ultimately her ratings are official, and it’s a massive undertaking.
Producing a complete set of Rating Scale numbers requires tabulating the result of every game contested by all 308-football playing schools in the VHSL … and the result of every game played by all of their opponents.
In 2024, that includes 53 schools in states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia and Maryland, as well as the District of Columbia.
“We’ve made it very difficult,” Haun said. “We were sitting here last year in November on Sunday morning, and we had to go down the list of criteria because two teams were tied. We were down to letter ‘G’ or letter ‘H’ [of the tiebreaker]. The deciding factor was, what did a team in West Virginia do? Did they win or lose?
“We’ve made a system so hard that for our teams to get in, we had to depend on a score from West Virginia.”
* * *
Much of Bickley’s work involving the Rating Scale takes place well before the high school football season begins in late August.
VHSL schools are directed to submit their upcoming football schedules to the league office by May 1. Bickley enters each schedule into her computer program to produce a VHSL master schedule that is usually released in late June or early July.
But wait. Virginia schools’ football schedules are not the only ones on the VHSL website.
Every out-of-state school and Virginia private school that meets VHSL criteria are also listed with their schedules, which sometimes are not easy to locate.
“I left here a couple Fridays ago, Lora Bickley’s sitting out there typing football schedules in the program,” Haun remarked. “I said, ‘Lora, what are you doing? They were due May the 1st.’ She said, ‘Yes, but now I have to enter the schedule of every private school and every out-of-state school that we’re playing.'”
Moreover, Bickley has to determine which classification each of those schools would fall under in Virginia based on their enrollments.
To unearth that information, Bickley scours various states’ Department of Education websites or calls colleagues at other states’ high school associations.
Once the season begins, Bickley has to track postponements, makeup dates and forfeits … of 368 schools in six states and Washington, D.C.
“[People] know she does a lot of work,” McCall said. “They know it’s time-consuming. They don’t know just how time-consuming.”
* * *
While Bickley uses modern computer software instead of an abacus, she is no machine.
She is the same person whose roots are in a 600-acre farm in Orange County that her father, Lin Baker, managed for a dentist who lived in Washington.
She was married in 1972 and divorced by the time she had a regularly scheduled mammogram in 1994 that turned out to be anything but routine.
The October test revealed breast cancer. She underwent surgery at Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville on Halloween.
Very scary stuff.
“The doctor said, ‘Have you ever had any trouble?'” she recalled. “I said, ‘No. The only thing I’ve had is I woke up with a sharp pain about six months ago.’ I got back to the office. She called, and I hadn’t even sat down. She said, ‘You’ll need to come back.’ I said, ‘When?’ She said, ‘Right this minute.'”
A Halloween surgery date also meant the VHSL football playoffs would start in less than two weeks and someone else would be responsible for determining the first-round pairings while she recovered.
“I asked the surgeon, ‘How long can I put this off?’ He looked at me kind of funny, and I said, ‘Well, I’ve got this football program I need to teach someone really quickly.’
“The main thing I thought of was, I’ve probably got the best family, the best work family, but when you go in and do this, it’s just you and God.”
Bickley has remained cancer-free, but in 2012 she received even worse news, and it was the worst a mother can hear.
Bickley’s daughter, 38-year-old Lora Melissa Myers, was killed in an automobile wreck in Fairfax County, survived by a husband and a 16-month-old daughter.
“The gentleman that hit her, the eyewitness said they thought he was dead before he hit her. He had a medical emergency and hit her head-on,” Bickley said.
Somehow, with the help of faith, family and friends, she soldiered on.
“And never came to work carrying a burden,” McCall said.
* * *
So how did a nice girl like Lora Bickley get stuck in a job like this?
Job promotions over the years should have relieved her of the task of crunching football numbers, but breaking up was hard to do.
“As I moved up, I was given the task of teaching whoever took my place how to do the ratings,” she said. “They’d stay a couple years, then I’d have to teach someone else and they’d leave. I said, ‘I’m tired of teaching someone else every two years. Just let me take it.’ And they did.”
For one year, VHSL athletic program assistant Carrie Little will handle Bickley’s duties with the football Rating Scale before the work is farmed out to the 24 regions, four in each of the VHSL’s six enrollment classifications.
All involved have Bickley’s cell number, which fittingly is just a few digits off from the VHSL office phone.
Condoulis has worked at the VHSL for 41 years. When she walks around the corner from her desk on Monday, she will see an empty chair.
“I try not to think about her leaving,” Condoulis said. “It’s going to be sad. It’s going to be lonely. Lora is truly the heart and soul. Everybody loves her. She helps everybody. I’ve been with her for 41 years. For me, the office will never be the same.”
Much of McCall’s job as the director of communications/media and public relations involves answering questions from nosy reporters.
Recently he got one he couldn’t handle:
Just how much will Lora Bickley be missed?
“You can’t quantify how much she meant and does here the last 50-some years,” McCall said. “You’re going to miss her. To put a degree on it or a percentage on it, it’s impossible to answer.”
Bickley began working at the VHSL when Earl Gillespie, Bill Pace, Art Green and Clarence Jones were among the directors and the office was located on the grounds of the University of Virginia. Her arrival preceded the hiring a year later of Claudia Dodson, who is widely recognized as a pioneer in girls’ athletics on a national level.
So Friday will be tough to swallow for Bickley.
Sure, she has a bucket-list trip to Iceland planned with several family members. She plans to devote more attention to her granddaughters and spend more time volunteering at her church.
But Fridays, and particularly Friday nights, will seem just a bit different.
“I am very excited, but other than losing my daughter, that’s going to be one of the hardest things to do … walk out of this office on the 30th. This is my life.”
