The athletic director for Pinellas County Schools has directed every public high school in the district not to schedule St. Petersburg Catholic in any sport during the 2026-27 school year.<\/p>\n
It is the first time the district has formally moved to freeze out a private school.<\/p>\n
In a statement July 15, the district confirmed that county athletic director Marc Allison has instructed all high schools not to enter into new athletic contracts with St. Petersburg Catholic until further notice. District and school leaders met privately July 14 to discuss concerns, the statement said, and agreed to continue those discussions in the fall.<\/p>\n
The statement did not say what prompted the decision, and did not address whether the freeze would be lifted. <\/p>\n
Contracts signed before June 25 will be honored and all previously scheduled games will be played, the district said. That includes the Barons\u2019 football season opener against Gibbs and a volleyball match against Northeast High.<\/p>\n
Games that were scheduled but yet under contract are off. St. Petersburg Catholic\u2019s volleyball team dropped five other matches against county public schools. <\/p>\n
The order marks an escalation of a long-simmering tension. Public school coaches have for years quietly declined to schedule private schools they suspected of recruiting, but never as a matter of district policy.<\/p>\n
For some public school coaches, the move was overdue.<\/p>\n
\u201cI sent a thank you note to Allison,\u201d St. Petersburg High football coach Denis Gillen said. \u201cThis is out of control. I\u2019m glad somebody finally stood up and did something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The directive lands as the district contends with a decade-long enrollment slide. Pinellas County Schools has lost roughly 17,000 students since 2018-19 \u2014 the steepest percentage drop of any large district in Florida \u2014 and now counts about 45,000 empty seats.<\/p>\n
In February, the school board voted to close Cross Bayou Elementary and Disston Academy and merge other campuses, and a second, larger round of closures and consolidations is due before the board this fall.<\/p>\n
District officials have attributed the decline to falling birth rates, the cost of living, hurricane displacement and a rise in homeschooling. Hendrick has called it a decades-long problem the whole community faces, and projects the trend will persist through 2050.<\/p>\n
Private schools are part of that landscape. Since Florida made vouchers universally available in 2023, more than 500,000 students statewide have used public money for private-school tuition or homeschooling. <\/p>\n
St. Petersburg Catholic is approved to participate in the state\u2019s Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options program, and tells prospective families that all of them are expected to apply for a state scholarship, according to the school\u2019s website. <\/p>\n
The scholarships are available to any Florida student eligible for public school, regardless of income, and are worth $7,868 for a Pinellas high school student in 2026-27 \u2014 meaning a student who leaves a Pinellas public school for the Barons can carry state money along.<\/p>\n
Pinellas officials have not cited private schools among the reasons for the district\u2019s enrollment losses.<\/p>\n
At the center of the athletic dispute are transfers. St. Petersburg Catholic has taken in at least two dozen over the past two seasons, since Jesse Chinchar took over the football program last year.<\/p>\n
Chinchar said the movement is nothing new.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese things go in cycles,\u201d he said of transfers. \u201cThere have been transfers at plenty of public schools. Before I got here, this school was losing a lot of kids and they never complained. Eventually, I\u2019ll lose some here, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chinchar has watched a schedule dry up before. Until 2024, he coached Clearwater Academy, a private-school power that teams across the Tampa Bay area \u2014 not just in Pinellas County \u2014 were reluctant to play. Its football program stopped playing that year.<\/p>\n
The additions have transformed the Barons on the field. After managing just three winning seasons in the previous two decades, St. Petersburg Catholic went 12-1 last season and reached a region final. Quarterback Chase Burrill, a transfer from Northside Christian, threw 53 touchdown passes \u2014 a Pinellas County record.<\/p>\n
The school is now considered among the favorites to win a state title this year. It has also reshaped its athletic department, hiring coaches in volleyball, wrestling, boys basketball, boys soccer, softball and baseball over the past two years.<\/p>\n
St. Petersburg High boys basketball coach Chris Blackwell yells instructions to team members during a 2020 game at Seminole High School. The longtime Green Devils coach left to become head coach at St. Petersburg Catholic this year. [\u00a0Tampa Bay Times file photo\u00a0]<\/p>\n
The most prominent of those hires was boys basketball coach Chris Blackwell, who left St. Petersburg High in April after 25 years and more than 600 wins, seven state semifinal appearances and two trips to a state championship game. Some of his former Green Devils players planned to follow him.<\/p>\n
The investment extends beyond the sideline. St. Pete Rising reported that the St. Petersburg Development Review Commission approved a multiphase, $64 million campus master plan whose later phases lean into athletics, including a roughly 80,000-square-foot athletic center with a new gymnasium, coaches\u2019 offices and wrestling and cheer space. <\/p>\n
School President Ross Bubolz told the outlet that athletics had historically been the least-supported area on campus and that the school now wants to build spirit around its teams.<\/p>\n
Allison\u2019s order landed in the middle of that ascent.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis took me completely by surprise,\u201d St. Petersburg Catholic athletic director Ryan Mueller said.<\/p>\n
In a statement released July 10, before the meeting, the school said it admits every student through its established process and operates in full compliance with all applicable rules and regulations. While calling the scheduling decision disappointing, the school said it had requested a meeting with Pinellas County Schools leadership and was awaiting a response.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are hopeful this dialogue will lead to a positive outcome that serves the best interests of all students,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n
Blackwell, who spent 25 years at a public school before crossing over to St. Petersburg Catholic, said he understood the district\u2019s position but questioned focusing on a single school.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get it,\u201d Blackwell said of the decision. \u201cBut there\u2019s players who move around throughout the county, not just one school. I hope that everyone can come together and work out a solution that\u2019s best for all kids.\u201d<\/p>\n
The timing softens the immediate blow. Fall sports schedules are largely set, but the ban complicates winter and spring seasons still being filled out. Blackwell said he had four games scheduled against public schools and has already replaced three.<\/p>\n
It is not the first time St. Petersburg Catholic\u2019s athletic program has drawn scrutiny. In 2006, the Florida High School Athletic Association found the school guilty of three counts of recruiting and four counts of illegal practices in football, fining the program $13,000 and banning it from the postseason for three years \u2014 among the harshest penalties the association had handed down at the time. It was a repeat sanction: the program had been placed on probation in 2000 for improper contact with a Gibbs player and banned from the postseason in 2001 for recruiting.<\/p>\n
The program struggled to stay competitive in the years that followed. Now it is a contender \u2014 and the county has stopped scheduling it.<\/p>\n
The freeze has no end date. Allison\u2019s instruction runs until further notice, and the two sides do not plan to talk again until the fall. In the meantime, the Barons will open their season against Gibbs, under a contract signed before any of this began.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The athletic director for Pinellas County Schools has directed every public high school in the district not to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-341275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}