The athletic director for Pinellas County Schools has directed every public high school in the district not to schedule St. Petersburg Catholic in any sport during the 2026-27 school year.
It is the first time the district has formally moved to freeze out a private school.
In a statement July 15, the district confirmed that county athletic director Marc Allison has instructed all high schools not to enter into new athletic contracts with St. Petersburg Catholic until further notice. District and school leaders met privately July 14 to discuss concerns, the statement said, and agreed to continue those discussions in the fall.
The statement did not say what prompted the decision, and did not address whether the freeze would be lifted.
Contracts signed before June 25 will be honored and all previously scheduled games will be played, the district said. That includes the Barons’ football season opener against Gibbs and a volleyball match against Northeast High.
Games that were scheduled but yet under contract are off. St. Petersburg Catholic’s volleyball team dropped five other matches against county public schools.
The order marks an escalation of a long-simmering tension. Public school coaches have for years quietly declined to schedule private schools they suspected of recruiting, but never as a matter of district policy.
For some public school coaches, the move was overdue.
“I sent a thank you note to Allison,” St. Petersburg High football coach Denis Gillen said. “This is out of control. I’m glad somebody finally stood up and did something about it.”
The directive lands as the district contends with a decade-long enrollment slide. Pinellas County Schools has lost roughly 17,000 students since 2018-19 — the steepest percentage drop of any large district in Florida — and now counts about 45,000 empty seats.
In February, the school board voted to close Cross Bayou Elementary and Disston Academy and merge other campuses, and a second, larger round of closures and consolidations is due before the board this fall.
District officials have attributed the decline to falling birth rates, the cost of living, hurricane displacement and a rise in homeschooling. Hendrick has called it a decades-long problem the whole community faces, and projects the trend will persist through 2050.
Private schools are part of that landscape. Since Florida made vouchers universally available in 2023, more than 500,000 students statewide have used public money for private-school tuition or homeschooling.
St. Petersburg Catholic is approved to participate in the state’s Family Empowerment Scholarship for Educational Options program, and tells prospective families that all of them are expected to apply for a state scholarship, according to the school’s website.
The scholarships are available to any Florida student eligible for public school, regardless of income, and are worth $7,868 for a Pinellas high school student in 2026-27 — meaning a student who leaves a Pinellas public school for the Barons can carry state money along.
Pinellas officials have not cited private schools among the reasons for the district’s enrollment losses.
At the center of the athletic dispute are transfers. St. Petersburg Catholic has taken in at least two dozen over the past two seasons, since Jesse Chinchar took over the football program last year.
Chinchar said the movement is nothing new.
“These things go in cycles,” he said of transfers. “There have been transfers at plenty of public schools. Before I got here, this school was losing a lot of kids and they never complained. Eventually, I’ll lose some here, too.”
Chinchar has watched a schedule dry up before. Until 2024, he coached Clearwater Academy, a private-school power that teams across the Tampa Bay area — not just in Pinellas County — were reluctant to play. Its football program stopped playing that year.
The additions have transformed the Barons on the field. After managing just three winning seasons in the previous two decades, St. Petersburg Catholic went 12-1 last season and reached a region final. Quarterback Chase Burrill, a transfer from Northside Christian, threw 53 touchdown passes — a Pinellas County record.
The school is now considered among the favorites to win a state title this year. It has also reshaped its athletic department, hiring coaches in volleyball, wrestling, boys basketball, boys soccer, softball and baseball over the past two years.
The most prominent of those hires was boys basketball coach Chris Blackwell, who left St. Petersburg High in April after 25 years and more than 600 wins, seven state semifinal appearances and two trips to a state championship game. Some of his former Green Devils players planned to follow him.
The investment extends beyond the sideline. St. Pete Rising reported that the St. Petersburg Development Review Commission approved a multiphase, $64 million campus master plan whose later phases lean into athletics, including a roughly 80,000-square-foot athletic center with a new gymnasium, coaches’ offices and wrestling and cheer space.
School President Ross Bubolz told the outlet that athletics had historically been the least-supported area on campus and that the school now wants to build spirit around its teams.
Allison’s order landed in the middle of that ascent.
“This took me completely by surprise,” St. Petersburg Catholic athletic director Ryan Mueller said.
In a statement released July 10, before the meeting, the school said it admits every student through its established process and operates in full compliance with all applicable rules and regulations. While calling the scheduling decision disappointing, the school said it had requested a meeting with Pinellas County Schools leadership and was awaiting a response.
“We are hopeful this dialogue will lead to a positive outcome that serves the best interests of all students,” the statement said.
Blackwell, who spent 25 years at a public school before crossing over to St. Petersburg Catholic, said he understood the district’s position but questioned focusing on a single school.
“I get it,” Blackwell said of the decision. “But there’s players who move around throughout the county, not just one school. I hope that everyone can come together and work out a solution that’s best for all kids.”
The timing softens the immediate blow. Fall sports schedules are largely set, but the ban complicates winter and spring seasons still being filled out. Blackwell said he had four games scheduled against public schools and has already replaced three.
It is not the first time St. Petersburg Catholic’s athletic program has drawn scrutiny. In 2006, the Florida High School Athletic Association found the school guilty of three counts of recruiting and four counts of illegal practices in football, fining the program $13,000 and banning it from the postseason for three years — among the harshest penalties the association had handed down at the time. It was a repeat sanction: the program had been placed on probation in 2000 for improper contact with a Gibbs player and banned from the postseason in 2001 for recruiting.
The program struggled to stay competitive in the years that followed. Now it is a contender — and the county has stopped scheduling it.
The freeze has no end date. Allison’s instruction runs until further notice, and the two sides do not plan to talk again until the fall. In the meantime, the Barons will open their season against Gibbs, under a contract signed before any of this began.