Teams:
Bloomingdale
Durant
East Bay
Lennard
Plant City
Strawberry Crest
Tampa Bay Tech

Welcome to big-boy football…
This ain’t pee wee, Pop Warner, Midgets, Juniors, whatever you want to call it. This is old-school smash-mouth high school football a la Floridian style. Sure, teams in this district will lineup in spread formations at times, but make no mistake about the fact this group is won or lost with the ability to play keep away and punish opposing offenses with ball-hawking and bruising defenses. You can go up and down the list of teams in this district and find a combinations of behemoths on the lines and speed on the edges along with playmakers at the skill positions. Every single week in this district will be a battle and that includes a team like Strawberry Crest who went 1-9 last season but returns virtually the entire roster for the next two seasons even after this one.

Oh so close, but that’s in the past now…
Two of the potential favorites in this group Lennard and Plant City were painfully close to making the postseason last year even though the Raiders were 4-6-1 and the Longhorns were 7-3. Lennard came from out of nowhere to finish third in the district of death and had it not been for a six point loss to Hillsborough would have been in the playoffs capping one of the most miraculous turnarounds in county history. Five of PC’s six losses came by four points or less in 2014 and with both of them returning absolutely stacked rosters the schedule makers got this one right by having this game played the final week of the district season on October 30th in Plant City.

About that October 30th date…
Plant City and Lennard aren’t the only ones sharing the spotlight that Friday night before Halloween. All kinds or tricks or treats await Strawberry Crest at Bloomingdale and East Bay at Tampa Bay Tech that evening. If the district holds how we think it could hold together, then these three games will all have postseason implications and perhaps send us to a tiebreaker on the following Monday.