FHSAA moves football finals to Daytona, Tallahassee

Call it the Drive to Daytona.

Or, for small schools, the Trek to Tallahassee.

High school football in Florida is getting set for another audible.

The Florida High School Athletic Association announced Friday that next year's football championships will be spread over two weekends in Daytona Beach and Tallahassee, after 12 years at Camping World Stadium in Orlando. The deal will remain in place through 2021.

This season, Classes 1A through 3A would play their finals at Gene Cox Stadium in Tallahassee from Dec. 5-7, with all kickoffs at 7:30 p.m. The exact order of games remains to be determined.

For Classes 4A through 8A, the finals will be set for Daytona Stadium from Dec. 11-14, a Wednesday through Saturday. Four of the games would kick off at 7 p.m., with a Saturday kickoff at 1 p.m.

"After listening to feedback from our membership, we felt having two locations stretched out over two weeks made the most sense," FHSAA executive director George Tomyn said in a statement.

The shift reflects a move to smaller stadiums — Daytona Stadium holds 10,000 fans, while Gene Cox Stadium seats 6,500 — compared to the far larger capacity of roughly 65,000 at Camping World Stadium, which had drawn complaints over lack of atmosphere.

After bringing in a total attendance of 52,750 fans for eight games in 2007, when the finals moved to Orlando, the stadium had struggled to draw half that many in some recent years, with a low of 717 fans for the 2013 Class 2A final between Lakeland Victory Christian and Hialeah Champagnat.

Those problems outweighed the obvious Orlando trump card of a centrally located, relatively convenient stadium. Although the move won't drastically affect Jacksonville teams' driving distance, Class 2A and 3A schools from the Miami area now face the prospect of a drive of seven hours or more to Tallahassee.

Daytona Stadium, which is the home venue for Bethune-Cookman football and the site of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics title game, previously served as FHSAA championship host from 1989 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. The FHSAA initially planned to return the finals to Daytona in the spring of 2016, but the deal collapsed later that year.

Gene Cox Stadium previously held a final between Tallahassee Godby and Clewiston in 1986, before the association installed a central location for state finals.

Not since 1988, the last year of host schools for finals, has the FHSAA held football championships in multiple cities, although both Dolphins Stadium (now Hard Rock Stadium) and FIU Community Stadium (now Riccardo Silva Stadium) in Miami held games in 2005.

Under the new format, every game except for the second Saturday afternoon contest in Daytona Beach would be played in the evening. That's a change from the schedule at Camping World Stadium, which held three games on Fridays and Saturdays.

Splitting the finals over two weekends reverts to a system used from 2005 to 2015, with one significant adjustment: Classes 5A through 8A will now have a full off week before their finals.

Barring a future return to Orlando, Mandarin's 37-35 Class 8A victory over Miami Columbus last December enters the record books for now as the last FHSAA final at Camping World Stadium.