Interesting concept and we should be open to consider these kinds of possibilities going forward as the current environment for HS football is not ideal.
south dade has been a top team for well over 20 years! lake gibson gets all the transfers in central florida it wants, read a wrestling message board and see the truth behind that. there are kids that transfer from brandon and go to lake gibson and win big, has happened 2 or 3 times in the last few seasons. south dade long time hc just retired and his long time assistant, who wrestled for him, is taking over. could be a new power house in the state. jesuit is alwasy good and has been for a long time, dating back 15 plus years. brandon is not near what they were when cozart was in charge(even though his son is hc and he is still coming in working with kids, sitting in the corner, coaching offseason kids).
First, high school wrestling, to my limited knowledge, is not at a big-time, big $ level like football and basketball. So, I don't think that comparison works for what I'm talking about. I'm not opposed to schools offering sports as extracurriculars per se.
If we return to football, perhaps we could use my alma mater as an example. What you've said about Brandon wrestling can mostly be said for Lakeland football. So, under my plan, Lakeland High school no longer offers a football program operating at anywhere near the financial level it is now. It would be a club sport, if they fielded a team of any kind at all. What effect would that have on the football players in Polk county? It would almost certainly be a benefit. As is mostly already the case, kids zoned for all sorts of different schools play football for Lakeland. It's an attempt at a...regional all-star team. There would absolutely be one or two Polk/regional all-star programs existing. What would be gone are the dysfunctional programs already lacking support. This would lead to a consolidation of resources such that the exisiting major programs have more $ invested, better coaches and fan support. The kids see themselves as representing Polk county, and not a particular school, anyway.
This aint your daddy's Brandon wrestling team anymore. Brandon has fallen off the globe from what they were when we were in HS. But now you have top teams like South Dade, Lake Gibson, Somerset Academy, and Tampa Jesuit that pretty much dominate the sport in the state of florida. Somerset is a school that takes full advantage of the situation that I explained earlier. They also have a lot of kids that go there and wrestle in grades 6 through 8th and then transfer to South Dade for freshman year or stay at Somerset. They even had a kid the past few years that would play football for Western HS and wrestle for Somerset. It is what it is....The system is F'ed and there aint no going back.