Coconut Grove native and former football player Buddy Howell remembers fondly his playing days at Coral Gables High, especially his senior year in 2013, when the Cavaliers went 11-2 and won a championship.
That year, Coral Gables defeated one of Miami’s private-school athletic powers, Christopher Columbus High School, in both the regular season and the playoffs.
“We felt the love from the Coral Gables community that year,” said Howell, who grew up just a mile from the school’s Le Jeune Road campus and went on to star as a running back for Florida Atlantic University before embarking on a brief NFL career.
These days, Howell is Coral Gables High’s running backs coach, and that love from the community is a lot harder to feel. The Cavaliers are coming off a 4-5 season that included a 45-7 loss to Columbus.
Meanwhile, Columbus is on a roll: a routine state championship contender and a producer of top college and professional football prospects, including quarterback Fernando Mendoza — a graduate of Coconut Grove’s St. Stephen’s Episcopal Day School — who won the 2025 Heisman Trophy and is expected to be the No. 1 pick in the 2026 NFL Draft.
Columbus’ boys basketball team boast similar success: four straight state titles, and a recent graduate — Cameron Boozer —who is projected to be among the top three picks in the 2026 NBA Draft.
And it’s not just Columbus.
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Despite smaller student bodies — and, presumably, smaller pools of athletic talent to draw from — private schools in South Florida outcompete public schools in a wide variety of sports.
According to a computerized ranking of high school sports teams in Miami-Dade, private or charter schools comprise nine of the top ten teams this year in boys basketball, eight of ten in boys soccer; nine out of ten in girls soccer; and nine of the top ten in girls volleyball.
Why the mismatch? A brief survey of local coaches and school athletics directors reveals myriad causes, but much of it boils down to money.
Here are some factors:
Fan Support: In years past, spectators flocked to the marquee public school battles, especially in football and boys basketball, and those ticket sales paid the bills throughout the entire athletic department.
In 1965, a football game between Coral Gables and Miami High drew 48,631 ticket-buying fans to the Orange Bowl.
In 1989, a boys basketball game between Miami High and Carol City drew a record crowd of more than 10,000 fans at Miami Arena.
In 1998, a football game between Jackson and Northwestern – known as the annual “Soul Bowl” — drew 46,474 fans at the Orange Bowl.
But attendance — across all high school sports — has been trending down for years.
“The emphasis on public schools is no longer there,” said Larry Blustein, the dean of local high school sports coverage with more than 55 years of experience who now writes for Prep Redzone Florida. “There are so many high schools that the product on the field is diluted, and the would-be loyalty to the once-large public high school has been splintered.”
Indeed, Coral Gables High, which once drew students from a tight cluster of neighborhoods close to its campus, now attracts them — through its magnet program and other school choice options — from as far away as Homestead to the south and Miami Shores to the north, explained athletic director Louis Romero
“They are so spread out,” Romero said, “that we’ve lost that sense of community.”
Former Miami Herald sports writer Manny Navarro, now with sports news site The Athletic, believes the drop in fan interest in elite-level high school sporting events in South Florida coincided with the loosening of rules allowing student-athletes to change schools.
“With those big [public] schools, you had tradition, history, rivalries. All of that started to change with magnet programs,” said Navarro. “That was really the first transfer portal. Coaches figured out how to get top athletes to their schools — even if they were not in their district.”
Without the community-wide buzz of years past, the annual football game between the Palmetto Senior High Panthers and their public school archrival Killian Cougars — a high-profile showdown that routinely drew over 4,000 fans — attracted less than 700 last fall.
As a key revenue stream to support its program, “that’s not going to cut it,” said Palmetto athletics director Michael Polizzano of the “Big Cat” game.
Student Enrollment: Due to a steady wave of new private schools, charter schools and magnet schools across Miami-Dade in recent years, there are far fewer students attending the traditional public schools.
G. Holmes Braddock High, which in the early 2000s boasted a whopping 6,000 students, now has just 2,500. Killian, which once had 3,200 students, is down to about 700. A similar pattern has played out across the county.
Fewer students means fewer athletes to field competitive teams, but more importantly, less revenue from state and county funding sources.
Athletic Transfers: Though still technically against the rules of fair play, changing schools for the purpose of participating in a sport is increasingly common. Violations are difficult to prove and school choice mandates provide easy cover for coaches who consolidate athletic talent at a tighter circle of existing powerhouses.
“If a kid isn’t playing enough or isn’t being featured enough, he or she can just leave and play somewhere else,” Romero said, allowing them to compete for multiple schools in the same sports — including within the same grading period.
A year ago one such transfer student, Neimann Lawrence, led Coconut Grove’s private Ransom Everglades School to its first football playoff game in nearly two decades.
Lawrence, one of the nation’s highest rated quarterback prospects, left the school last fall to play for the highly rated Northwestern Senior High football program before transferring yet again, in January, to private school athletic power American Heritage School in Plantation — his third school in less than a year.
Coral Gables’ Howell says the unchecked player movement — whether it falls within the rules or not — creates an unlevel playing field. “It’s hard to compete with the private schools when you can’t keep your kids on the roster,” he said.
Nowadays, adds Coral Gables High head football coach Derick Murdock, he and his staff rarely work with student-athletes throughout their four-year high school playing career.
“If you can keep a player for one year, that’s good,” Murdock said. “If they stay two years, great. Three years is awesome, and four years rarely happens.
“You teach a player, coach him up, and then a private school snatches him up. There’s not much loyalty.”
Coaching Pay: As the saying goes, high school coaches do it for “the love of the game.” There’s little else.
In the current school year, Miami-Dade public school head football coaches receive a paltry $3,553 stipend for the fall season plus another $1,908 for spring training.
The head coaching stipend for most other major sports, like basketball and baseball, stands at $3,355. Head coaches of smaller sports — cross-country, golf, tennis, bowling, and water polo – receive $1,955.
Assistant coaches are paid $1,694.
Coral Gables boys basketball coach Armand Shoon told the Spotlight that he puts in about 700 hours a year coaching his sport, including the offseason, which equates to less than $5 per hour. Other coaches say 700 hours might be a low-ball estimate.
“It’s challenging,” Shoon said. “I have excellent assistant coaches. We coach because we love basketball, and we want to see the youth in our community prosper. But not everyone will do this job due to the lack of appropriate compensation.”
Most public school coaches see their stipend as a supplement to a regular salary for teaching or other work at the school. But with the coaching demands rising and the rewards – financial and intrinsic – not keeping pace, many are opting to teach an extra class instead of coach, which pays double the typical coaching stipend.
Private schools can and do pay their coaches much more than public schools. At football powerhouses, it’s not uncommon for a head coach to earn upwards of $100,000 a year. In those cases, insiders say, football comes first, and the school will then find a fit for the coach at the school as a teacher, or other staff member, thus justifying the salary.
Facilities: Programs with better on-campus facilities tend to win more, and that’s almost always the private schools. For instance, schools that have on-campus pools tend to dominate competition in swimming and water polo. In Miami, the schools with on-campus pools are Ransom Everglades, Gulliver Prep, Belen Jesuit, Miami Country Day, Riviera Prep, and MAST Academy. Those are all private except for MAST, which is a magnet school.
Some other schools rent Miami-Dade College’s pool, but even paying that bill can be a struggle.
It should come as no surprise that Gulliver’s girls are the reigning state champions in water polo. Between their girls and boys programs, Gulliver has won 12 state titles. Ransom Everglades has won nine state water polo titles since 2008.
Athletic Budgets: In the post-COVID-19 era, public schools have slashed their athletics budgets, with junior-varsity programs — the feeder system for varsity teams — among the biggest casualties.
Girls basketball has been especially hard hit, according to Miami Beach High athletic director Edgar Botto, who said just five public schools in Miami field junior-varsity girls basketball teams this season out of 42 public high schools in Miami-Dade County.
Junior-varsity competition remains robust at Miami-area private and charter schools, including Ransom Everglades, Immaculata-La Salle and the all-girls schools Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart.
Officials from Ransom Everglades and Carrollton — where tuition and fees this year top $55,000 and $52,000, respectively — declined to answer questions about their athletic department budgets.
But one former Miami-area athletic director said private schools routinely spend about $1 million a year on athletic operations alone — covering game fees, transportation, travel, uniforms, equipment, film services, fitness trainers and many of the same amenities found at small-college programs. The total can climb higher when factoring in participation fees some schools charge parents for high-cost sports such as sailing, crew and tennis.
Conversely, Botto said it costs Miami Beach High a bit over $100,000 to run its entire sports program, and, even with that relatively low number, it’s still a struggle to come up with the funds.
Somewhere between $35,000 and $50,000 of that comes from Miami-Dade Public Schools. The difference is made up – if everything goes well – by fundraising and ticket sales, mostly from football games.
Polizzano, at Palmetto High, said a school is lucky if it has a booster club to help raise money.
And in an ironic twist, the Florida Legislature last month passed a law allowing high school coaches to spend up to $15,000 of their own money to help cover expenses for the teams they coach — a measure Murdock, Gables’ head football coach, calls well-intentioned but ultimately misguided.
“That bill would just give private schools more leeway and power to do what they already do with all their boosters,” Murdock said. “It’s not an even playing field.”
Coral Gables High’s athletic budget is a relatively hefty $250,000, an amount Romero said is a constant struggle to meet and one that weighs on him around the clock.
“Every sport wants or needs something,” Romero said, noting that unlike private schools, public schools cannot charge parents supplemental athletic participation fees. “People say, ‘Why doesn’t the school pay for this or that?’ But where is this mystical fund? The top 100 ‘solutions’ people suggest, we’ve already gone through.”
The disparities inevitably make their way to the courts and playing fields, at times giving a competitive edge to the well-staffed, well-funded teams from wealthier schools.
“I build a $100,000 weight room and then Columbus or Belen [Jesuit] builds a million-dollar weight room,” said Romero. “When you play against a private school like that, the only thing we share in common is the ball. Nothing beyond that is close.”
Despite the frustration, Romero stays in the fight because, as he puts it, athletics are the best drop-out-prevention programs.
“For a lot of kids,” Romero said, “the only reason they come to school is to play sports.”
But even that, notes Blustein, the veteran sports writer, may be changing, as more student-athletes take advantage of state rules allowing homeschooled students and those taking online classes to compete for virtually any school they choose.
“When Miami Norland reached the state final in 2023, a great majority of those players took online classes and came to campus only for football practice,” Blustein said of the program known as Florida Virtual. “It’s a problem. Since they don’t attend classes on campus, there’s no loyalty to the school, and that’s reflected in attendance figures. That connection is lacking.”
But for some student-athletes, playing close to home with childhood friends remains a powerful draw. Rome Delgado-Gonzalez, a Coral Gables High graduate now a senior playing men’s basketball at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said playing with and for his community is something he will always cherish.
“I grew up just 10 minutes from Gables [High],” said Delgado-Gonzalez, who will intern with the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder this summer. “I had the chance to go to Columbus or Belen, but I valued the people I had around me at Gables, including all my best friends. It was the best decision I’ve ever made.”
Acknowledging the disparities between the athletic landscapes at public and private or charter schools, a growing number of states — including Alabama, Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee and Texas — have split their state playoff competitions so that public schools compete only against other public schools. Private schools compete for a separate state championship.
The Florida High School Athletic Association has studied and debated such a change here but has yet to act.
“I don’t have a timeline,” Palmetto’s Polizzano said of the split-playoffs idea. “But I think it’s coming.”
This story was originally published in the Coconut Grove Spotlight, a WLRN News partner.
