The Florida High School Athletic Association’s 13-member board of directors is once again tasked with putting their stamp on a plan to realign football teams for the 2026 and 2027 seasons in a meeting at FHSAA headquarters today in Gainesville.
Just like in 2022, when the vote was a tight 9-7 to approve a momentous football-only metro-suburban split for two years, and in 2024, when that experiment was shot down by a 9-4 vote by a new-look committee, the board has its hands full.
Based on reaction by a number of coaches to a proposal voiced by FHSAA executive director Craig Damon on Wednesday, their will be debate.
Damon’s proposal called for reducing the number of traditional championship classifications to six – down from the current eight. There will a seventh championship bracket with the advent of the Open Division, which was already approved for the 2026 season. That pulls the top eight teams, based on rankings, out of their classifications and into a separate tournament.
The second seismic change in the proposal would eliminate mandatory district games, which were not required in the early years of football championships but have been a fixture for decades. Instead, district tournaments with four teams in each would be contested in the final two weeks of what is now regular season play.
The board discussed eliminating mandatory district play for football in its 2023 reclassification process but did not favor that change. The sticking point in that element of realignment is that a large chunk of football programs have dropped out of FHSAA play and gone independent — mostly because that frees them to develop their own schedule and avoid games against powerhouses.
FHSAA looks to tackle reclassification debate; is fewer classes a winner?
Reclassification comes every two years and the FHSAA typically tackles football first. Any major changes are usually added to the other bracket sports (basketball, baseball, soccer, etc.), although that was not the case with the metro-suburban split, which marked the first time the first time classifications for football were based on something other than student enrollment counts.
The FHSAA’s long-standing practice of aligning teams based solely on school size returned in for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school year. But many say that using only that one data point fails to measure the impact rampant transferring has had on high school sports, for schools big and small.
Chaminade-Madonna, a Broward County Catholic school with less than 400 boys was ranked by MaxPreps as the No. 1 football team in the state in 2024.
FHSAA eyes 8-team Open Division for super powers such as Chaminade, Aquinas
Varsity content editor Buddy Collings can be contacted by email at bcollings@orlandosentinel.com.
