Jeffersonville may end up with two football leagues

By DAVID A. MANN
David.Mann@newsandtribune.com

May 21, 2008 06:02 pm

— JEFFERSONVILLE — Are you ready for some football?
We hope so, because Jeffersonville could become the home to two competing youth football leagues, as negotiations between the city and the Jeffersonville-Clark County Youth Football League, known as JCCYFL, have fallen through in recent weeks.
The city is poised to start its own youth football league. However, officials from JCCYFL say they’re sticking around.
Since early this year, the two sides have been negotiating a way in which JCCYFL’s board could remain involved and the Jeffersonville Parks and Recreation Department would take over its finances.
“The last meeting was left as, the deal was done,” said Cory Norman, a league board member.
The league has about $14,000 in debt that the city was going to pay off. Its finances would have been opened to the city, Jeffersonville High School’s football coach Steve Cooley would have been involved and some new playing rules would have been enforced, Norman said.
“None of those things were a problem,” he said.
The next thing board members heard about it was a brief in this newspaper, saying that the city was going to start its own league this fall.
Larry Thomas, the city’s communications director, said part of the breakdown was the fact that JCCYFL last week began advertising for registration and the parks department was left out of the loop. The two entities hadn’t solidified anything in writing, so at that point, city officials decided to go ahead with their own league, he said.
League President Derek Hughes said the two sides had not discussed seeking registration, so JCCYFL went on with its typical sign-ups.
“If they really felt that was a true problem, why didn’t they call us,” he asked.
Mayor Tom Galligan, who’s been involved with the negotiations, commented on the football issue during Monday night’s meeting of the Jeffersonville City Council, saying that any organization playing on the city’s fields was going to be financially solvent.
“We want to run a league that’s safe, that pays its bills,” Galligan said. We need to run the best youth football league that we can run — and to do that we need to run it.”
Galligan also questioned the league’s safety practices, saying that last year he saw two kids have a helmet-to-helmet collision. The first thing someone did was run out onto the field and took their helmets off, Galligan said. Medically, that’s the last thing they want to do.
Hughes defended the league’s safety record, noting that medical personnel are on the scene during every game.
“My goal is to make sure every kid in the city of Jeffersonville has the opportunity to play youth football,” Galligan said.
For now, Hughes and Norman have requested an additional meeting in order to continue negotiations. Thomas said that as of Tuesday nothing has been set up.