FHSAA votes to start fall sports on time, but South Florida might not be able to play
High school football in Florida will start on time this fall — at least for a handful of counties around the state.
The start of fall sports is going on as planned despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Florida High School Athletic Association’s Board of Directors decided Monday. Practices for fall sports, including football, can begin next Monday as long as school, district, county and local government rules allow it.
The Board hopes the start plan will grant schools flexibility to play something resembling a full season, whether on time or in a delayed fashion.
The proposal, which was approved by a 10-5 vote, will keep the full fall calendar intact, including postseason dates. Schools which can’t start on time and are therefore unable to qualify for the postseason will be able to continue playing regular-season or exhibition games into FHSAA playoff time.
Effectively, this could eliminate the vast majority of South Florida teams from state championship contention a year after Miami-Dade County and Broward County combined to win seven of the eight FHSAA football championships in 2019.
The FHSAA still needs to determine a date by which teams will have to declare their intention to compete in the state series postseason or to continue playing games outside the state series. The FHSAA currently requires teams to play eight regular-season games in order to be eligible for the postseason, although the Board said it plans to alter the requirements for the 2020 season.
“The state finally found a way to slow down Dade County,” tweeted Columbus coach Dave Dunn, who won a state title last year.
The state finally found a way to slow down Dade County.
— Dave Dunn (@cchsballcoach) July 21, 2020
Dade and Broward county Coaches we need to meet As to whether we want ask our superintendent’s to remove us out of the #FHSAA https://t.co/gPaEMT2Phw
— Luther Luke Campbell (@unclelukereal1) July 21, 2020
Currently, Miami-Dade and Broward counties — along with Palm Beach County — form an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic and public schools will not be able to begin practicing next Monday. The same is true for most of the state’s other metropolitan areas, including the Tampa Bay area, Greater Orlando and the Jacksonville metropolitan area.
The FHSAA’s announcement comes on a day that more than 10,000 positive cases of the coronavirus were confirmed statewide. Florida has now had 360,394 cases of the virus and is regularly seeing five-digit case counts more than four months after the pandemic hit the United States in March.
The decision came more than four hours into video conference meeting Monday after the Board voted down earlier proposals by the Sports Medicine Advisory Committee (SMAC) and an FHSAA-established Fall Sports Task Force. SMAC proposed a series of recommendations — all voted on unanimously by the 10-person committee of medical professionals — which included delaying the start of fall sports indefinitely. The Task Force proposed a more complex staggered start system.
The Board also voted 12-4 not to require a standardized health questionnaire, as was suggested by SMAC. None of SMAC’s recommendations were passed into law. The Board plans to reconvene within the week to consider SMAC’s full list of suggestions.
As part of its recommendations, SMAC deemed it unsafe to play football and volleyball at the current moment. It recommended sports only resume when there’s a downward trajectory in cases or percentage of positive tests and a total positive percentage of less than 5 percent for at least 28 days, using a seven-day rolling average.
About an hour into the meeting, FHSAA executive director George Tomyn said the association’s recommendation was to keep the calendar intact, and let individual schools and districts their own choices about when to start.
Earlier Monday, the Georgia High School Association decided to push its season back two weeks. The California Interscholastic Federation announced Monday it is delaying all fall sports until 2021. While the idea of delaying fall sports into the new year was mentioned, it was never officially proposed.
Like Florida, California and Georgia have reemerged as COVID hot spots in July.
The only middle-ground proposal made throughout the meeting came from Mark Schusterman, the co-athletic director at Riviera Prep. Schusterman proposed delaying the start of practices until Aug. 10, then reconvening Aug. 3 to make a more informed decision using SMAC’s proposal, but his proposal was quickly withdrawn after it failed to garner significant support because of concern it would just delay dealing with this significant challenge.
