Rick Pedone
Sports Editor

The Florida High School Athletic Association again is trying to appease its small public school members by creating a rural division of 40 to 50 schools.

The Rural Division, approved by the FHSAA Board of Directors Tuesday, is intended to level the balance of power among the small schools.

Administrators at small public schools have long complained that they are forced to compete against private schools with deep pockets that benefit from an influx of talented foreign students who can dominate at that level.

FHSAA state champions in many team sports at the lower classification levels, Class 2A and A, are private schools that invite elite international players to their teams.

Several years ago, the FHSAA created two new classes for football, 2B and 1B, to address that issue.

Rural Division members must agree to participate in all of these team sports: football, baseball, volleyball, soccer and softball.

The Osceola County private Class A schools won’t be included in the Rural Division because of the local population count, but they may be indirectly affected when the FHSAA reclassifies the small school brackets in November.

The FHSAA board unfortunately denied a recommendation that would have formed a FHSAA clearinghouse to investigate the eligibility of foreign students, and another recommendation that would have based the classification of schools on student populations in grades 6-12.

Those measures would have more effectively balanced the power for the small schools. Private school athletes may compete at the varsity level in the sixth grade, so why not include those students in the classification numbers?

It’s hard to say whether a new Rural Division will have a meaningful impact on the issue of small private schools dominating state competitions.

The best solution is to create separate divisions for public and private schools.

What the FHSAA doesn’t need is one more football class. That would make nine.

Most team sports are grouped into six classes. As the FHSAA now has about 650 high school members, and it will add another 30 members over the next year, that is reasonable.

Adding more classes dilutes the meaning of winning a state championship. When you have  seven, eight or nine state champions in a sport, do you really have a state champion?

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Grumpy old guy alert: There’s too much noise in the stadiums. All stadiums. The vuvuzelas, those horns that the South Africans constantly blow like a non-stop 5 o’clock rush hour during the World Cup soccer matches, have irritated TV viewers all over the world. Many fans are wearing ear protection.

They ought to pass out ear plugs at every arena in the U.S., too.  Even many high school gyms have become noise factories.

What happened where an NBA game doesn’t matter without 140 decibels, 300 spotlights and fog? And, that’s during the game.

Here’s the irony. All the sound and noise is designed to attract the young fans, but they can’t hear a thing because they are wearing ear buds and listening to their iPods while they text their friends to tell them they are at the game.

Instead of going to the new Amway Center to see the Magic next season, I think that I’ll just crank up the chainsaw and enjoy a similar experience at home.

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The United Football League, where the Orlando Tuskers play, is offering one fan an opportunity to follow league commissioner Michael Huyghue for one day, and to participate in making decisions involving the league.

Isn’t this how our Tampa Bay Bucs ended up as bottom feeders in the NFC South?

Anyone interested can submit a video or a written entry to describe why they should be the commissioner for a day at UFL-football.com.