The FIT puts Tocoi Creek in Winter Park on a Thursday school night, The St. Johns Tattler

The FIT puts Tocoi Creek in Winter Park on a Thursday school night

The FHSAA's invitational bracket gives Beachside and Tocoi Creek an eleventh game this week, which is the good part. The rest is the card: both games on Thursday, Nov. 12, a school night, with Beachside home against Yulee and Tocoi Creek riding about a hundred miles to a 6-4 Lake Howell team. More football for teams that did not win a district is a defensible idea. Running it a day early, on the road, with school in the morning, is a choice the adults made.

By Truett Speer November 9, 2026

Two county teams play Thursday. Five play Friday.

The Friday five are in the regionals. The Thursday two are in the FIT, the Florida Invitational Tournament, which is the FHSAA’s second bracket, running beside the regionals for the teams that landed on no regional card.

Start with the good part, because there is one.

Beachside is 6-4. Tocoi Creek is 3-7.

Neither made a regional card. Without this bracket, this week has no game in it for either of them.

Instead they practice.

Beachside gets Yulee at home, 6-4 against 6-4, which is as fair a card as a bracket can deal.

An eleventh game is another week of practice. For a young team, the practices are the prize.

That is the case for the FIT, and it holds.

Now look at the card itself.

Both games are Thursday.

The regionals are Friday.

Thursday is a school night. The players sit in first period Friday morning either way.

Beachside’s Thursday is a home game at Barracuda Stadium. Manageable.

Tocoi Creek’s Thursday is Winter Park, outside Orlando, a ride of about a hundred miles each way by the map, on a bus that leaves after school and comes back whenever the fourth quarter says it can.

The invitational road does not get shorter, either. Win, and the FIT championships run Dec. 3 to 5 in The Villages.

Nobody should blame the matchmaking. Lake Howell is 6-4, and a 3-7 team in a consolation bracket is going to draw a better record somewhere.

The clock and the map are different. They were chosen.

If the association believes the FIT is a real tournament, schedule it like one. Friday night. Pairings drawn to keep a school-night bus under an hour.

The regionals manage geography for seeding reasons, and a tournament with no seeds to protect could manage it for the kids instead, which is the one advantage this bracket has and the one it declines to use.

If it is just extra football, that is still worth having. Then say so, and put it on a Friday, where extra football belongs.

The kids will play wherever the card says. That was never in question.

The card says Thursday, in Winter Park. Kickoff at 7:30.

This is a column, the writer's argument, based on the facts shown above. Our news coverage is held to a separate standard, described on our standards page.

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The FIT puts Tocoi Creek in Winter Park on a Thursday school night

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Truett Speer

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