FHSAA's Friday court hearing canceled

A Friday preliminary-injunction hearing in the gender-equity lawsuit against the Florida High School Athletic Association has been canceled, signaling a potential settlement.

The FHSAA's board of directors unanimously voted Wednesday to rescind an April decision to trim the schedules in all sanctioned team sports except football. That earlier decision spawned the lawsuit, which claimed it violated Title IX guidelines because football was exempted.

FHSAA executive director Roger Dearing was out of the office Thursday and not immediately available. Jacksonville-based law professor Nancy Hogshead-Makar, representing the plaintiffs, told the Times on Thursday all parties have agreed to a self-imposed deadline of July 31 to reach a settlement.

Hogshead-Makar, a swimming gold medalist at the 1984 Olympics, said her group is seeking a "declaratory judgment" that clearly would state Policy 6 (the initial FHSAA amendment to reduce schedules) violated federal gender-equity laws.

The reduced-schedule measure initially was a cost-cutting effort by the FHSAA amid the state's education budget crisis. Now that it has been rescinded, the onus of budget cuts in athletics falls more heavily on local school districts.

Hogshead-Makar warned individual districts that opt to cut contests on their own in some sports and not others could be in Title IX violation.

"We want the declaratory judgment so we can make that clear to the other school districts and schools so that we don't have to have 100 more lawsuits," Hogshead-Makar said.

When asked if she foresees further litigation at this point, Hogshead-Makar said the ball is in the FHSAA's court.

"It depends on the posture of the FHSAA; it completely depends on them," she said. "We're trying to settle the case. There's no compromise here."