Apparently not.  

Here's my first rant of 2025.  Can the FHSAA at least keep accurate archive records!?  The sheer amount of misspelled teams, missing entries, incorrect scores and duplications is utterly ridiculous.  This is just football.  I can't imagine how messed up the other sports may be.  

That was a great explanation.  As a home owner, I am more than willing to pay more property taxes to increase teacher pay, have better facilities and to fund sports programming.  This is not even about funding a strong football team.  Rather, its about funding the minimum amount needed just to field any sports team.  Here in Pinellas county, each school gets literally less than $500 for a sports team.  You can't even buy a single helmet for that amount.  My boys PHU wrestling team received $300 to fund the entire season.  That is less than the $400 entry fee into a single wresting tournament.  Therefore, all sports are essentially club sports that are self funded.  I had to pay $500 for two boys to play football and then $600 total for two boys to wrestle.  The wrestling team has to have parents drive the wrestlers to away matches since buses are not funded.  It's ridiculous.

I'm more inclined to say that is the nature of the football.  The FHSAA record books are littered with many examples of this scenario throughout the decades.

It would take a smaller county that has $$$ and values the educational system. Can’t have an overabundance of retirees, whose interests do not lie in public education. Collier, Sarasota, etc wouldn’t work because retirees wouldn’t vote for higher taxes to go toward public education.    Okaloosa, Bay, Walton, St Johns come to mind. They would have to vote to make property taxes around 3% or pass a substantial sales tax (penny tax or more).    As far as panhandle coaches pay, Okaloosa used to combine HFC/AD to make it an admin position and they were paid as such. They recently removed the requirement for HFC to also be the AD, allowing other coaches to be the AD. It gave women more of a chance to be AD. When they redid their HFC pay structure, they made it so the minimum pay is 75k unless your experience/degrees take you over that. I believe Walton still combines and Bay doesn’t combine but has a great setup for HFC.    Teaching pay in the panhandle isn’t great. They meet the new state minimum but, historically, many teachers are military spouses whose pay was the second income, so there didn’t seem to be a major push for higher wages.    Walton county has recently raised teacher pay and advertised across county lines to poach teachers, which is a good move on their part. The academic side of schools shouldn’t function like a business as we have to provide for all students, regardless of their circumstances, but administratively schools would do well to function like a business. Pay more, attract and retain talent, COMPETE.  The bottom line is an entire county has to value education and want to make an investment in it. Because if the size of the districts, it’s hard to get a majority on that same page.