ADs not yet convinced on proposal for changes

GAINESVILLE — The only consensus coming out of Wednesday’s lengthy committee debate over a controversial Florida High School Athletic Association proposal to shake up the varsity sports scene is that there is none.

That was made clear when FHSAA administrator Justin Harrison, a prime architect of the proposal, asked twice for a “show of hands” vote before the athletic-directors advisory committee meeting adjourned about five and a half hours after it began at association headquarters.

Harrison first asked how many on the 15-person committee believed the best move would be keeping the status quo in reclassification and divide teams based solely on school enrollment size. Not one hand was raised.

Harrison next asked how many committee members were in favor of the FHSAA staff proposal, which would eliminate districts and distribute teams across divisions based on power rankings, not enrollment.

Again, not one hand shot up — eliciting a few nervous chuckles and the feeling that this discussion still has a long way to go.

“Going forward means that we continue to have healthy discussions like this,” said first-year FHSAA executive director George Tomyn.

A three-hour discourse that ended at noon for a lunch break wasn’t enough to get anywhere near a bull’s-eye on a measure that could go to a vote of the FHSAA board of directors next month.

After committee members munched on a barbecue chicken meal and reconvened to talk for a bit about hard-hitting spring sports issues like whether or not clay courts are OK for postseason tennis, the conversation circled back for an unscheduled second swing at the reclassification proposal.

That frank back-andforth volley of opinions was held after almost all of the coaches who showed up to make or listen to comments about the proposal had headed home.

If one majority sentiment was expressed, it is that many athletic directors and coaches don’t want to lose the allure of having district tournaments that include all teams.

“Do your power rankings, give me our six classifications and districts,” Scott Drabzyk, a committee member and Father Lopez athletic director, said to Harrison.

Drabzyk, a former Orange County coach and athletic director, said he is warming to the idea of power ratings as a factor in reclassification but said he wants to keep the concept of a tournament that gives all teams a way to play their way into the state playoffs.

He, like many others, asked the FHSAA to come up with a plan that can keep that element of the game “for those of us who can’t get over not having something to play for.”

In the proposal drawn up by FHSAA staffers, districts would go away and roughly 250 of the 600-plus teams in each sport would not make the playoffs.

New tweaks to that plan were unveiled as Wednesday’s talks began.

The revised format has just 32 teams in the elite Division 1, based on power rankings from the previous two seasons.

That’s down from 64 in the initial model.

And D2 and D3 are now scaled back to 64 teams each.

All teams in those top divisions would make the playoffs.

The remaining teams would be spread evenly across D4, D5 and D6. In the boys basketball sample that would be 144 schools in Division 4, 146 in Division 5 and 145 in Division 6. The top 64 teams in those divisions, based on final regularseason power ratings for that year, would qualify for region play.

The FHSAA also erased its plan to divide playoff teams into eight geographic regions after hearing concerns that some of those groups could be loaded with too many of the best teams.

An option Harrison mentioned would instead divide each division into two halves, with I-4 serving as the approximate dividing point between the North and South. In theory, if the top two seeded teams were in either half, they would both reach the final four.

“The flip side of that is you’re going to have more travel,” Harrison said. “That’s where we need some direction from you as members. We could have two regions, we could have four regions, we could have no regions.”

What he does know is this: “I think our staff still has a tremendous amount of work to do.”