Brevard Public School officials have decided to take away the right to athletic competition for all winter sports. No out of county travel permitted for basketball, soccer or wrestling! That means the level of competition drops exponentially and chances of competing in a state series let alone winning a state series becomes null and void.  In turn, dramatically decreasing the number of athletic scholarships to colleges and universities for Brevard County Senior Athletes. This is not warranted. Florida is now in Phase 3. COVID cases are at an all time low. As of the end of September, Brevard Schools have had 158 positive cases since the beginning of the school year out of almost 80,000 students and employees. That's only 0.19% of the school population which is well within the the CDC guidelines of 5%! These numbers do NOT warrant these limitations! They do NOT warrant stifling the futures of so many of Brevard's athletic hopefuls!

This becomes a double whammy for Brevard County Wrestlers! Wrestlers are limited to their number of competitors anyway since they can only wrestle in 1 of 14 weight classes. Best case scenario, there would be one athlete in every weight class on every Varsity team. However, this is not the case. At best, most schools only fill 7 to 8 weight classes per team which means even less competition. This definitely puts Brevard wrestlers at a huge disadvantage for the state series and college scholarship opportunities. University Wrestling programs don't look at film like other sports. It is largely based on beating ranked opponents and the number of wins you have against many other teams. A record of 47-2 looks 100x better than a record of 12-0. Limiting travel to our county wrestling programs is handing down a death sentence to any chance of success for our wrestlers.

In addition to wrestling, all athletes across all winter sports (basketball & soccer) will be impacted in a negative manner by the Brevard Public Schools' decision to limit competition to only Brevard County schools.
Both competitive and recreational high school athletes will feel the burden of having to stay in Brevard County to compete. The stronger programs across the county will now have to fill their schedules with games they wouldn't normally schedule because of a mismatch in talent...and vice versa. These competitions will be decided by extremely large margins which do not help any of the athletes involved.

Competitive athletes competing for athletic scholarships will be some of the most significantly impacted among those in winter sports. Those with college aspirations will now miss out on the competitive exposure
which college coaches use to evaluate talent in competitive contests. College coaches do NOT spend valuable time watching bad games. There is very little information a college coach can gather from watching an athlete participate in a game against inferior competition. This could potentially result in scholarships being granted to athletes in other counties surrounding Brevard as many have
been given permission to travel outside of their respective counties for competition.

There is proof that travel can be done safely for all sports! We and hundreds of other families have been traveling all summer without any issues. Since May, we have been attending club practices, wrestling camps both in and out of Florida, and state and national tournaments safely. All venues have taken steps to protect everyone involved with required masks for all spectators and wrestlers (accept when wrestling), social distancing, temperature checks, regular sanitization of mats and seating, providing hand sanitizer stations as well as making the wrestlers sanitize their hands right before wrestling. It has been done successfully and it can be continued many more times from here.

Please help out our Brevard County winter athletes be the best athletes they can be by signing our petition. Please sign and share! LET BREVARD COMPETE!