JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The Florida High School Athletic Association’s first foray into the thorny issue of reclassification is off and running with no shortage of controversy tagging along with it.
The FHSAA’s board of directors held an informational meeting this week that started the conversation on where schools would be placed and how districts could look for the next two years. The FHSAA added a vote on the proposal to its agenda for Monday in Gainesville.
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The initial proposal would be a radical shift from where things are now and has the potential to create some massive disparities across the football landscape. It suggests going from the current eight total classifications (Classes 1A-7A and Rural) down to six (Classes 1A-5A and Rural). The last time the FHSAA had six total classifications was in 2002.
In the proposed change, there would be no required district games. Instead, a district tournament would be created in Weeks 10 and 11, with the top four teams in those districts determined by the FHSAA rankings points meeting in a mini-tournament. District teams who don’t make the top four would then be free to find games for Weeks 10 and 11.
“With the district tournament at the end, it aligns us with what we do in all our other team sports,” said FHSAA executive director Craig Damon.
Damon said the proposal would eliminate the two- and three-team district problem, and have no fewer than six to eight teams in a district to make things competitive for the mini-tournament.
Going from seven classifications to five creates serious imbalances that would need to be addressed. In the new proposed 1A, the number of schools would go from 65 currently down to 49. With 32 teams making the playoffs, that means all but 17 teams would make the postseason in that class.
The opposite issue would exist in the proposed Class 4A and 5A landscape. Using the enrollment figures, those classes would include 136 teams apiece, more than double what currently exists (64).
In feedback from member schools shared by Damon, they overwhelmingly want to keep districts (85%). Nearly that number (78%) want to maintain some form of required contests.
Not having a certain number of games locked in has been a sticking point for coaches in the past. It was a major reason why Bolles and Trinity Christian petitioned to move up to Class 5A in 2016. Both programs were skittish of staying where they were during that reclassification because districts were erased for teams in Classes 1A-4A.
There’s been an ongoing buzz that schools shouldn’t be placed in classifications based strictly on enrollment size, but Damon said it’s tricky to do here. Coaches and administrators use the argument that some of the best teams in the state like Class 1A Hollywood Chaminade-Madonna and 2A Cocoa are in the smaller classifications.
Open enrollment in Florida has helped cool off the contentious topic about public and private school state playoffs, but using enrollment numbers to determine classifications has become the next polarizing topic. Athletes can play fall sports at one school, winter sports at another and then finish in spring at another school. It’s not uncommon to see athletes transfer schools two or three times in the same season.
“It makes it extremely hard in the state of Florida to look at anything besides enrollment unless you go to something where play whoever you want to play and we’ll seed you and rank you and put you in classes at the end of the season,” Damon said. “If we could ever get our coaches to agree to something like that, I think that’s probably the only way we could get to where it’s apples to apples, so to speak, and it’s more on a level of equity, I guess if you want to call it that, playing talentwise. But until we can get to where we would agree in the state that that’s something we want to look at sort of made it hard to get away from strictly enrollment.”