Craig Damon, executive director of the Florida High School Athletic Association, is ready to pitch a reclassification plan that would reduce the number of state championships in major team sports starting with the 2026-27 school year.
There are now eight classifications, based on student enrollment counts, with a Rural division (1R) and Class 1A through 7A playoff brackets for football, baseball, softball and girls volleyball. Soccer has seven classes (1A-7A).
Heading into a Monday meeting of the FHSAA’s 13-person board of directors, Damon favors a revision that would still have eight playoff brackets but cut the number of state title classes to six. FHSAA staffers are tasked with reclassifying schools every two years and alignment is listed as a discussion item on Monday’s agenda.
“We want to talk to our board and see what they’re comfortable with,” Damon said in a Friday morning phone interview. “We’ll share a few options for discussion. We want to be able to send out a poll to get feedback from coaches and then have our board vote on a proposal at the November meeting.”
The advent of the Open Division, approved by the board previously, adds a new bracket for the powerhouse programs that are dominating Florida football and boys basketball, and to a lesser degree, other high school sports.
The other five championship classes in Damon’s proposal would be 1A through 4A and 1R.
The FHSAA would add two invitational playoff brackets for 1A-4A teams that aren’t among the 32 that qualify for the state series. The invitational concept was tested in Rural division football last year with 12 teams that did not make the 1R playoffs choosing to participate in a platform built for schools that wanted to experience postseason play.
Damon said the invitational plan can work for other sports. The FHSAA hopes that adding that second tier for teams that struggle to compete against the best will bring back some of the many teams that have dropped out of its playoff system. Last year, 64 schools opted out of districts to play 11-man football in the Sunshine State Athletic Association — which promises parity by seeding teams into multiple playoff brackets based on power rankings.
As currently planned, the Open Division would pull the eight top-rated teams in each team bracket sport out of their appointed class. That would bring small-school juggernauts, like 1A Chaminade-Madonna, into a football bracket with other elites, such as St. Thomas Aquinas (currently 6A), American Heritage (4A) and Venice (7A).
Damon said cutting the number of championship brackets can reduce some of the expensive travel that teams face in district play and particularly in the postseason.
Most of the longest trips are made by Panhandle teams in FHSAA regional brackets that stretch from the Pensacola into the Orlando area.
Damon cited the costs and logistical challenges Milton High School faced in boys basketball last season. Milton, located near Pensacola, traveled 475 miles (one way) to win an overtime Class 6A Region 1 semifinal game at Oviedo, and three days later bussed back nearly six hours for a game it lost at Tocoi Creek of St. Augustine.
It’s safe to say no classification plan has ever made every school in the state happy. The FHSAA spent months developing a revolutionary move that split schools into two divisions (Metro and Suburban) for the 2022 and 2023 football seasons. Proponents said that change did indeed create more parity, citing closer games in state finals. But in December, 2023, the board voted to scrap that format.
One of the concerns about reducing classifications is that it increases the enrollment differentials between schools at the bottom and top of a class.
“We have to look at the enrollment gaps,” Damon said. “In football particularly, you don’t want a school with 300 kids playing a school with 1,500.
