Divide Them Up

This will sound like sour grapes. Yes, sour grapes will seem to be dripping from every word in this space, so I wrote it on Sunday prior to the outcome of the Port St. Joe High School baseball game.

No idea how that game will turn out and no idea if the Sharks will go on to the championship game or will earn a state title. All that will happen after these words are written and before they are read.

And before going further, let's have a shout out for scholastic sports this spring.

Spring is the time of year when sports are so plentiful there is a little something for everybody, and, my, how Gulf County has been represented.

The Port St. Joe softball team reaches the state Class 2A title game. The Wewahitchka Lady Gators, despite an injury to their top pitcher, one of the best in the state, fight their way into the playoffs.

The Port St. Joe High girls' track team adds a second place to a championship and third-place finish the past three years at the state Class 1A meet. Parker Harris wins the pole vault, junior Kayla Parker continues her surreal high school career with three more wins.

And at Wewahitchka High School, Billy Naylor finished his stellar high school career with a lunging second in the 800 meters while freshman Theryl Brown stamped himself as someone to watch in the high jump in the coming years.

The Port St. Joe High baseball team reached the state Class 2A baseball semifinals and the Wewahitchka Gators, after upsetting Tallahassee North Florida Christian, a champion two years ago, runner-up last season, are one of the primary obstacles in the Sharks' way.

So there is much to praise in the sports we have seen this year on the county's diamonds and tracks.

But it is time to say so long to the Florida High School Athletics Association unless the FHSAA finally comes to its senses and divides the brackets for its championships into private and public schools.

The FHSAA has danced around this issue for years and even came up, after a threatened secession by a number of North Florida public schools seven years ago, with a cockamamie scheme called the "Public Rural School" championship as some sort of appeasement.

Yes, there is new blood in the FHSAA's executive director's chair, but so far it is the same old lip service, only with state government intervention tossed in, which given the current strain on public taxpayers can be saved before it gets started.

Dr. Roger Dearing, who has served as a principal and superintendent of schools throughout Florida, is on board as executive director and during a recent meeting with school officials and coaches with a number of North Florida schools he heard first-hand the frustrations about the public schools and the uneven landscape they face with private schools.

Just look at the Tiger Sharks' matchup on Monday.

Here is Port St. Joe drawing from a county that has 14,000-15,000 residents against Jacksonville Providence, a private school that has the entire Jacksonville area in which to "recruit."

And there is little better way of putting it. Private schools have the ability, through scholarships, programs, whatever, to lure athletes without geographic boundaries.

Tampa Prep has a state championship volleyball program that might as well be a satellite for the United Nations.

Port St. Joe's string of four-straight state basketball titles was ended in the late 1990s by a private school that had a roster dotted with players from Europe.

What exactly is the lesson being taught kids? And, to add to that, while it might be fine for professional sports to conduct games on Memorial Day, why is the FHSAA holding some of its baseball semifinals on this holiday?

We are supposed to be honoring the nation's war dead. What lesson is this sending future generations about the veneration with which they should hold this holiday?

But Dearing was quoted by the Crestview newspaper as understanding that the issue of public/private is a far different animal in North Florida than it is elsewhere in the state, something many public school coaches in the region have long be shouting, while tilting into the wind.

If Dearing and the FHSAA are serious about evening the landscape, about making the playing surface a level one for all schools, the right thing should finally be done, and no we don't need a Florida House of Representative committee to issue a taxpayer paid report on how other state do it.

Pick up the phone, FHSAA.

The FHSAA should divide the two, private and public, into separate classifications. Keep everything else the same if it wishes, but pit private against private and public against public for a stake in state titles.

Effectively what the FHSAA is doing is rendering the regular season a meaningless exercise for many schools and programs with no real shot at advancing come postseason time because rules are not rules in the public/private debate.

And the playing field will never be level for small public schools as long as private school "athletic" factories want to horn in on the action. Have them go topple their own Goliaths.