Unlike last year, there doesn't seem to be a solution to the problems caused by the opening week postponements.
By JAMAL THALJI
Published September 10, 2004
Chaos.
That's the state of Pasco County football in the wake of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Frances.
Gov. Jeb Bush ordered Pasco County schools closed on the first Friday night of the season for use as hurricane shelters. That order, made the afternoon before opening night, caught county officials by surprise.
It also set in motion a complicated series of negotiations between the nine public schools to salvage opening week.
It didn't work.
Only two teams, Hudson and River Ridge, managed to play Tuesday. The rest of opening week may be gone, with seven teams stuck with nine games in 2004, and the home teams losing significant revenue.
It doesn't affect district play, or playoff positioning. How will the Sunshine Athletic Conference title be decided? No one knows.
Kit Broadbelt, the county's supervisor of athletics, said he instructed the schools to do what the county has always done in these situations:
Work it out themselves.
It worked last year, when Tropical Storm Henri postponed, but didn't cancel, opening week.
But it sure didn't work this season.
"We've always done it pretty much the same way we've done it all the time," he said. "If a school can work out a satisfactory result for the home and visiting teams and the administrations themselves are satisfied with the decision, then we go with that, whether it means the game is canceled or is played."
What was once the solution, Land O'Lakes coach John Benedetto said, may have been the problem.
"They left it up to the individual schools," he said, "and now we have a big mess."
Why didn't it work this year? Allowing the schools to work it out only works if both schools want to play. There was a point where some coaches wanted to move on, and others didn't feel comfortable playing in midweek. One of the biggest disagreements is between Pasco and Ridgewood.
"Weather-wise we had to make a decision (Monday), even though it turned out we could have played Tuesday," Ridgewood coach Troy Cornwell said. "But the major reason was we hadn't practiced since Thursday. I wasn't going to go without practicing, play a game against Dade City, and two days later play Hudson."
Pasco coach Dale Caparaso said he had scores of anxious kids in his house during the storm, desperate to play.
"Personally, I'm still fuming over the Ridgewood situation," he said. "I don't think that was handled with the best interests of the kids at heart."
Caparaso noted that Tuesday's Hudson-River Ridge contest didn't result in any injuries, and he said every senior has 10 games, more if they're fortunate.
"Quite frankly, the reward is the games," Caparaso said. "The 10 games during the year, and I think that was ripped from them."
Land O'Lakes coach John Benedetto is unhappy with his school's situation with Zephyrhills. His school complied when Zephyrhills wanted to reschedule last year's game at Bulldog Stadium. But now Benedetto is missing one home game at Gator Stadium, and that means less money for Land O'Lakes athletics. Zephyrhills coach Tom Fisher said his school couldn't accommodate Land O'Lakes because it couldn't get Mulberry to move tonight's game to Saturday.
And, don't forget, what started this mess.
"We had a lot of people working hard in shelters, doing things that were viewed as a higher priority than football," Broadbelt said. "We still have people that don't have power."
The slow-moving storm eliminated Monday, Labor Day, as a natural make up day. Tuesday would have been the next logical day, but the school district canceled school that day because the shelters were still needed. The weather was still in doubt Tuesday, and coaches didn't want to play that day and again three days later. They pushed for Saturday if possible.
But many had more important worries. The county was battered, power lost, homes damaged and schools busy as shelters. Some couldn't have played this week even if they wanted to.
Gulf coach Keith Newton said he and Mitchell coach Scott Schmitz wanted to play, but it was not possible.
"Talk to some of our kids in school and listen to some of the situations they've been in," Newton said. "They've had no power for 4-5 days, they were living in a hotel, they were living with a friend.
"There were a lot of problems. People want to think about football, but you want to think about those problems first."
Hillsborough County canceled opening week, while Pinellas re-scheduled it using a complicated Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday scheme. Hernando County decided to move its opening night games against Citrus County a day early in what proved to be a prescient decision.
"That's just genius right there," Caparaso said. "That's just brilliant. Maybe we didn't think about it. I certainly didn't think about it."
That will come up when Pasco County re-thinks its policy in a Monday meeting of the SAC executive board of principals and athletic directors.
"That is going to be a mess as far as stats and records," said Newton. "But I just keep saying it's minor compared to what could have happened if a major hurricane came onto us.
"We were lucky to get out of the way when we did. Losing a game is just one of those things that happens."
