The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘Pork barrel without pork’
Some question Thanksgiving football bill
Fans of Thanksgiving high school football got a literal vote of support this week in Hartford, a few sentences buried deep within a state bonding bill that awaits Gov. Ned Lamont’s signature.
Those sentences left one of the bill’s indirect targets with more questions, including why Thanksgiving football needed legislative protection, and why now that changes appeared not to be going anywhere.
“Pork barrel without the pork” is how Al Carbone, SCC commissioner and frontman for the Connecticut High School Football Alliance, which schedules interleague games for most of the state’s teams, described it. “So out of place.”
The football part comes almost two-thirds of the way through the 254-page bill, starting 4,562 lines in. The section has various requirements of boards of education: to maintain good schools, provide an appropriate learning environment, provide for transportation when “reasonable and desirable,” and require children 5-18 to attend school.
After two pages of that comes that boards “shall not delegate the authority to schedule interscholastic football games on Thanksgiving Day to any nonprofit organization or other entity that is otherwise responsible for governing interscholastic athletics in this state and shall not adopt a policy or prohibition against the scheduling of an interscholastic football game on Thanksgiving Day.”
Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford and co-chair of the Senate Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, told Hearst Con
necticut Media he inserted that bit after speaking with fans and others who were concerned about the future of Thanksgiving rivalries.
That stemmed from an Alliance proposal six months ago that would have scheduled teams’ seasons within their CIAC class, giving better teams tougher schedules. It also floated the idea of starting the season earlier, beginning the playoffs after nine regular-season games, playing championship games on Thanksgiving weekend and using Columbus Day as a day to play rivalry games. Reaction came fast and mostly against even the thought of losing that day.
“For city schools in general, Thanksgiving is something all the players look forward to,” Stamford coach Donny Panapada said Thursday. “For a lot of inner-city kids, the Thanksgiving game might be all they are looking forward to all season. If that rivalry game is in October, some kids on some of those teams then do not have anything to look forward to at the end of the season.
“It would still be a big game, but it would be much different. It is a big community event with alumni and college kids home. It really is a great tradition.
Still, as Carbone noted, Thanksgiving isn’t a universal game day. There were 37 games on Thanksgiving Day 2023 and another 13 the night before, plus seven on Tuesday.
There were 138 programs in 2023.
“What about the schools that play Wednesday night?” Carbone said. “West Hartford plays the Saturday before (to end Hall’s and Conard’s regular seasons).”
CIAC executive director Glenn Lungarini pointed out in a text that some schools have policies avoiding holidays as game or practice days to preserve family time.
“Unfortunately, this bill now unnecessarily creates conflicts for those schools,” Lungarini said. He would have liked a public hearing to discuss the matter, or even to have heard about it in a timely enough manner to clear up what he said was misinformation and unnecessary
language.
The CIAC isn’t mentioned by name anywhere in the bill, but it does appear in the Office of Legislative Research’s bill analysis, which says the CIAC schedules games now. The CIAC was quick to correct that.
“CIAC member schools create their own regularseason schedules, including the date of rivalry and Thanksgiving football games, and we do not foresee
any change in that process unless the schools themselves elect to change,” Lungarini said.
And that does not seem imminent.
The CIAC surveyed football coaches, athletic directors and principals after the 2023 season, asking about their interest in having “a centralized group of representatives from each league in the state” take over scheduling “within CIAC divisions.”
CIAC associate executive director Gregg Simon, the liaison to its football committee, stressed in an email in March that this was a survey, not a vote.
The survey got 323 responses, Simon said, 126 athletic directors, 113 coaches and 84 principals. The principals said no by the widest margin, 6436%. Coaches were narrower, 52-48%. Athletic directors leaned no 56-44%.
“Based on these results, the CIAC Football Committee voted not to make this proposal an official CIAC proposal,” Simon wrote in March.
The Alliance as it is schedules games involving teams from six of the state’s eight conferences, 100 games in all in 2024. The Pequot League and Naugatuck Valley League don’t take part. (Carbone suggested legislation to get them into the fold.)
While scheduling was at the heart of the proposal, Thanksgiving is still getting most of the oxygen.
“Whenever I talk to old players who played for us, they always talk about Thanksgiving against Southington,” Cheshire coach Don Drust said. “They talk about it for years beyond high school. It is so important to alumni and so many people in both towns. The game draws a big crowd and it means a lot.
“I do not have blinders on,” he added, “and I am not opposed to change, but I know that Thanksgiving football means a lot to the kids here at Cheshire. I do not think change is bad and it would still be a rivalry, but it would be different not being played on Thanksgiving.”