News and Public Media for North Central Florida
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Florida Delays High School Football Amid Coronavirus Surge

Gainesville High School practices through the changing weather conditions. Hurricanes' head coach Mark Latsko keeps his team ready to play no matter what.
Gainesville High School practices through the changing weather conditions. Hurricanes' head coach Mark Latsko keeps his team ready to play no matter what.

FORT LAUDERDALE — Florida's burgeoning coronavirus crisis is forcing its high schools to delay the start of their football and other fall sports seasons, a reversal aimed at quelling a revolt that could have pitted urban counties against their rural counterparts.

The Florida High School Athletic Association's board voted 11-4 Thursday night to push the first day of practices from Monday to Aug. 24 with games starting no earlier than mid-September instead of mid-August. The decision came as Florida has experienced a sharp increase in coronavirus deaths over the last two weeks, including another 136 recorded Friday as the state's total confirmed cases topped 400,000.

This was a reversal from earlier in the week when the same board voted 10-5 to start the season on time. That decision had angered administrators and coaches in Miami-Dade and other hard-hit urban counties as they could not safely start on time and their teams would likely have not been eligible to compete for state titles. The Miami-Dade school board threatened to withdraw from the association if the decision wasn't reversed.

Many of north Florida's rural counties have been lightly hit by the pandemic and some of their coaches wanted to start the seasons on time. Other affected sports include cross country, golf, swimming and girls volleyball.

"There are no good answers here," Lee County school board member Chris Patricca said during Thursday's online meeting, according to the Tampa Bay Times. "There is no perfect scenario where we can conduct football safely in the state of Florida and still conduct every other season of sport in the state of Florida. We have to be agile. We have to make decisions that we've never had to make before because we're in a circumstance that we have absolutely never been in before."

The state health department has recorded 855 COVID-19 deaths over the last week, an average of 122 per day - only Texas has had a worse week. It has been recording about 130 deaths per day, but it has a third more people than Florida.

Florida's leading causes of death, heart disease and cancer, each kill about 125 per day on average. After coronavirus, the three deadliest infectious diseases, flu/pneumonia, AIDS and viral hepatitis, kill about 10 per day combined.

The state recorded 12,444 new confirmed cases Friday, bringing the total since March 1 to 402,312. The total number of dead from the disease is now 5,768.

The Associated Press is a wire service to which WUFT News subscribes.