While no one should get their hopes up too high, it appears the FHSAA
board of directors could be revisiting its decision to reduce schedules
for all sports (except varsity football and competitive cheerleading)
by 20 percent this Thursday and Friday at the final meetings of the
school year. The meetings will take place at the Orlando Airport
Marriott.

Board member/Oak Hall athletic director Jeff Malloy, the most
vocal FHSAA dissenter of the reductions, said he hopes public opinion
will sway previous pro-cut voters.

“The Sunshine Law says I can’t speak to fellow board members
(about the topic), but I imagine many of them have received the same
type of e-mail feedback I have, which has pretty much all be negative
on the reductions,” Malloy said. “In my six years on the board, I’ve
never received so much feedback.”

Malloy said he believes Policy 6 was passed too quickly to
properly analyze the actual financial impact the 20 percent game
reductions would have.

Pro-cut supporters voted that way because they believed that would
be the only way to help schools through the current recession. Malloy
counters with two local examples of how the cuts are hurting schools in
the pocketbook.

* P.K. Yonge volleyball most likely would be on anyone’s list of
the top-15 programs in the state in that sport. The Blue Wave co-host
the Gatortown Classic each year with Buchholz, and it not only brings
in tremendous statewide talent (eventual final four teams Tampa
Berkeley Prep and Venice met for the 2008 title), it also serves as a
fundraiser for P.K. Yonge and Buchholz. Now, because the Blue Wave are
in a nine-team district (one in which PKY might not lose so much as a
game all season), they won’t be able to play in their own tournament.
That hurts financially and competitively, as coach Perry McDonald
always schedules big to help his team once the playoffs roll around.

* Oak Hall volleyball would belong on that same top-15 list as
P.K. Yonge. The Eagles fill their gym for often-entertaining matches
with rivals like Buchholz, P.K. Yonge, Gainesville, Eastside and Santa
Fe every year. Now, the reductions have kept only GHS and Santa Fe on
OHS’s 2009 schedule. Malloy makes a point when he rhetorically asks how
it helps Oak Hall’s program financially to have to play new district
opponent Leesburg First Academy twice a year in front of 50 fans while
not being able to play Buchholz with 500 people on hand. I can add
something here from a media persepective: our paper wouldn’t send a
writer or a photographer to cover an Oak Hall-Leesburg First Academy
regular-season match, but Oak Hall-Buchholz likely would get both and
possibly a spot on the front page of the sports section.

“The drum I’ve been beating is not in any way trying to be
disrespectful to (FHSAA executive director) Dr. (Roger) Dearing or my
fellow board members (who voted for the cuts), but most of the feedback
I have gotten has been against Policy 6,” Malloy said. “I feel like in
our first (9-6) vote, we didn’t serve our member schools well.”

If Malloy’s new proposal fails, the FHSAA could be hit with a lawsuit.

Mary Hogshead-Makar, a three-time 1984 Olympic swimming gold medalist,
is now a professor at the Florida Coastal School of Law in
Jacksonville. She said by not making any cuts in football, Title IX has
been violated. At the bottom of this blog, I have attached two letters
she sent to the FHSAA as the voice of a group called Spokespeople for
Florida’s Parents for Athletic Equity.

Now, even with the negative statewide backlash about the reductions,
there certainly is no guarantee if a re-vote happens that it will
overturn April’s decision. After the initial vote, one person very
close to the situation said those who came to that board meeting to
speak against the cuts “wasted their time because every board member
went in with their minds already made up, regardless of what side they
were on.” Another source added “it was a done deal long before the vote
went down.”

With that said, Malloy, whose tenure with the FHSAA concludes with
this board meeting, added he believes nobody on the pro-cut side of the
story is trying to hurt anyone else.

“I think this was pushed to (Dearing) by superintendents,” said
Malloy, echoing a statement told to me by an FHSAA employee a few
months back. “And through due diligence, he felt he needed to push the
budget crisis. I don’t think everybody thought of all the angles before
doing this. I also don’t think anyone did anything malicious. I think
Dr. Dearing’s heart is in the right place.”