Florida Adds 2 New Championship Classes To Basketball, 3 Other Sports

November 23, 2010 /
Orlando Sentinel (Fla.)

GAINESVILLE — The Florida High School Athletic Association’s board of directors on Monday morning approved a new reclassification plan that adds two additional championship classes for boys and girls basketball, girls volleyball, baseball and fast-pitch softball.

Those sports have had six classifications since the 1993-94 school year and now will match football with eight championship games beginning with the 2011-12 school year.

The vote was 12-3 for a plan that adds Class 7A for the state’s largest schools and incorporates a new Rural Division for 46 small-town schools, including Wildwood, The Villages and Pierson Taylor.

“People should be excited,” said Darrell Don, a board member and athletic director at Orlando’s First Academy. “We increased student participation in the playoffs by adding more teams, and we balanced the classifications so they are equitable. Those are good things, and so is the Rural division. Those schools needed that.”

The seven larger classes are to include 81 schools each, with 16 districts per class and an average of five schools in each.

The board voted unanimously to retain the eight-class format for football, which allows four championship games to be played at one site on consecutive weekends.

Football will add 7A and a Rural division that essentially replaces today’s 1B. Most of the state’s private schools that currently play 1B football will go to 1A, with relatively little change likely in Central Florida’s districts for those teams.

Football’s rural class encompasses 36 teams, most of them in North Florida.

Boys and girls soccer will go from five classes to six, with the addition of 7A. There is no 1A in soccer because a number of small schools do not field teams.

The plan adopted Monday was an 11th-hour creation that differed greatly from the original recommendation unveiled last week by FHSAA executive director Roger Dearing. That plan would have added the Rural division but not the other additional class.

The FHSAA operations committee met to discuss the topic Sunday night and expressed a number of concerns — including the fact that the staff-generated plan had big differentials in school sizes for 3A (301 students to 1,200) and 2A (18 to 300).

Jacksonville Bishop Kenny athletic director Bob West asked why other sports couldn’t adopt the football model with eight finals, and Dearing’s staff and school administrators worked late crunching numbers to produce the plan that was brought to the full board on Monday morning.

“The association has grown from 517 schools in the 1990s to now 670,” Dearing said after the meeting. “It was fair to add classifications.”

FHSAA staffers will begin their task of plugging schools into district next week and are expected to finalize an alignment plan for final approval before the board’s January meeting.


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