As the coach of the the Covenant Central Cougars--a homeschool soccer team from Sumter, let me add my 2 cents. First there are at least four homeschool soccer programs in SC that play against public and private Schools. Covenant Central, Providence Athletic Club (PAC)Panthers, Greenville Hurricanes and the Palmetto girls team in Florence. Plus the Easley Guradians play in the Fall. Additionally, there are homeschool basketball teams that I know of with Greenville and PAC--there may be others, I just don't know of them.
There are over 20 states that allow homeschool students to participate in public school activities (band, drama, sports, etc.) The rationale is fairly obvious, in that these families pay taxes in the community and public institutions are supported by tax dollars. The arguments against participation can be made by both sides. For example, many homeschool families do not want government intruding into any aspect of the education of their children. Some public educators may be against it because they believe that if a family chooses to not be involved in the local school, then they should not benefit from some "perks" that extracurricular affords them. That argument can be debated from many angles and I don't think it will do any good to argue that here.
Another idea that many speak about (not just homeschoolers, btw) is to delink athletics from schools. Thus everything becomes either privately financed OR use public funds, but disassociate the funding from schools. Then you get away from school eligibility questions, and everything because a free market question (albeit with public funding). Again, those are debatable questions, that have good merit from all sides.
Tim Tebow is a prime example of a homeschool athlete who was permitted by Florida law to play for a public high school. Interestingly in SCISA, a homeschool student may not play on a SCISA team unless he/she is taking at least four academic courses in the school.
Finally, SC is actually a fairly favorable state for homeschool teams, in that we may play any private or public school that desires to play us. Fortunately for us we've had opportunity to play some very high quality SCHSL teams over the last four seasons (Airport, Dutch Fork, BC, Andrew Jackson, Andrews, and others) and we are very appreciative of those opportunities. My only negative comment is that there are some who will not play us simply because we are homeschoolers.
