“Recruiting-Coaches, other members of the teaching profession, or lay people will not engage either directly or indirectly in recruitment of athletes to attend a particular high school. The assistant principal for Administration will be a member of the regular team that gives orientations to their feeder schools. Individual schools will be responsible for their programs and must assume the responsibility of seeing that interested teachers, graduates, or any other comply with the spirit of this directive.”
This excerpt from the Hillsborough County Athletic Guidebook of Procedures is all that mentions recruiting for public schools. More time is spent describing what needs to be done in order to hold a “proper” football practice. But I can guarantee that recruiting has caused many more problems than lack of ankle tape.
The problem I can immediately identify with this clause is its vagueness. The clause is entirely open to interpretation by the county as to what engaging “either directly or indirectly in recruitment” means. Private schools can recruit and train middle school aged kids for years before they appear in their respective athletic programs. While a coach in a public high school is hardly able to sit down and have lunch with a middle school kid of any athletic inclination. Why? No doubt a crusade to protect the safety of “youth” sports.
Youth sports in high school is a more cliched and useless phrase than compromise is on capital hill. But, the sports guide doesn’t acknowledge that fact yet. Fair competition between public and private high schools is evaporating, with schools like Jesuit, Tampa Prep, and Berkeley recruiting top athletes to fill up their rosters. Only sports magnet schools like Plant, Armwood, and, progressively more so, Steinbrenner can compete semi-fairly. And they have to get every athlete to sign a form saying that they were not recruited in any way before the student is allowed to play a sport.
The attempts to protect youth sports in America are valiant, but in vain in the modern world. Recently nine men were arrested in Broward County for making bets on youth football games involving pre-high school kids aged 5-15. The pot for the Super Bowl of the league was over $100,000 on a youth football game. In the ESPN thirty for thirty story about the University of Miami football team, multiple players recalled being chastised for mistakes on the field in high school, not by fellow teammates or even fellow students, but by parents.
Private schools, however, accept the abscence of “youth” from sports involving young people. As a result constant complaints roll in from the athletes I encounter in public schools about how far behind their team is compared to that of a private school. Cross Country finished 5th in states this year, the state champions were Belen Jesuit, a private school. The volleyball team reached the quarterfinal in class 7A, one of the teams to make the semifinals, St. Thomas Aquinas, was private.
That all may not sound like a lot, neither does the 2.12 public schools for every one private school in the state of Florida. Those statistics would suggest that more private schools should be succeeding, but one needs to dig deeper. More than two and a half million kids attend public school in Florida, contrasting to the 339,582 students in private schools. That’s an average of 713 kids per school in a public high school, and only 198 kids per private high school. Long story short, a private school making it as far as they consistently make it in any sport, should be a dramatically rare occurrence. It’s not.
I believe it is time for Hillsborough County to lay down its arms against athletic recruiting; it’s a dose of the real world to kids that have worked hard at something. Plus, if public schools aren’t allowed to talk to them, if they work hard enough a private school will surely come knocking.
Zealand Shannon / Sports Editor
