California Prep Championships : Officials Differ on Whether It’s a Wise Idea in All Sports : By RAY RIPTON, Times Staff Writer

When Kennedy High School of Granada Hills won the Los Angeles City Section baseball championship last June, more than a few of its players thought of themselves as the best team in the state.

That same feeling was experienced by players at Fountain Valley High, winner of the 4-A championship in the California Interscholastic Federation’s Southern Section.

Was Kennedy the best, or was it Fountain Valley? Or was some other team in a different part of the state?

No one will ever know. There is no state champion in baseball. For that matter, there is no football champion, either.

But there are state champions in boys’ and girls’ basketball, boys’ and girls’ track, wrestling, and girls’, but not boys’, volleyball.

It is puzzling to many athletes and coaches why there are state championship playoffs in some sports, but not others.

Officials who make those judgments cite lack of money and too much geography as reasons not to expand state championship playoffs.

Schools often can’t come up with enough money to send teams to state tournaments in all sports, and they often have to travel too far across California’s 158,693 square miles of mountains, desert and rugged coastline to get to them.

Those, at least, were the impressions gained in interviews with top athletic administrators, heads of coaches’ associations and coaches of Southern Section and Los Angeles City championship teams.

The state’s first state prep playoff competition was in football. Pomona High won the first championship in that sport in 1915.

Also in 1915, a state title game was played in rugby, and a state tennis tournament was established. In 1916, Whittier High won the first state basketball title, Pasadena High the first state swimming title. Track and field was added next, and baseball followed in 1918.

An outbreak of Spanish influenza wiped out the 1918 football tournament, however, and even before that, the basketball, swimming and tennis tournaments had been canceled because the money wasn’t there.

The minutes of the CIF’s federated council said about basketball: “No State basketball championship was declared since neither Fremont High School (in Fremont, near San Francisco) nor Hollywood High School cared to meet the heavy expenses necessary to bring their teams together.”

Some state championship playoffs were resumed after World War I, but in 1928, all state tournaments and meets, except for track, were eliminated. It took 45 years for them to start reappearing. A state wrestling tournament was established in 1973. A girls’ volleyball tournament was begun in 1978, then basketball was revived in 1981. There are also so-called state championships in golf, but they are actually separate southern and northern regional tournaments.

There seems to be no strong sentiment for adding state championship playoffs in other sports.

Jim Cheffers, the veteran director of interscholastic athletics for the City Section, said that several years ago a committee of school officials studied the state tournament situation and concluded that boys’ baseball and girls’ softball would the next sports to have state championships.

Recently, however, Cheffers said: “I think the feeling is to leave it where it is. There is some feeling that (there shouldn’t be) any more state playoffs.”

He said that arguments against state softball and baseball tournaments are that they would be held at the end of the school year, the cost involved and the probability of a small profit, if any.

Thomas E. Byrnes, state CIF commissioner of athletics, said that he remembers the study cited by Cheffers but that it was based on “now-outmoded criteria and final adoption would have to come from the (CIF) federated council.”

Byrnes said that the federal directive known as Title IX calls for equal treatment for male and female athletes. “You can’t have baseball without softball,” he said, adding that the CIF constitution and by-laws and the State Department of Education also require equality of opportunity in sports.

He said that softball would be a logical addition for girls and baseball would be the equivalent boys’ sport, that present Title IX equivalents are the state tournaments in girls’ volleyball and wrestling, primarily a boys’ sport.

He noted that 21,745 girls played volleyball in California last academic year but that only 2,941 boys did so, and that there were 18,487 boys in wrestling and a reported 215 girls, but none on all-girl teams. The numbers in girls’ volleyball and wrestling are what make them viable and equitable (under Title IX) state tournament sports, he added.

Said Byrnes: “If there were unlimited time, resources and large numbers of people (involved in a particular sport), certainly you should consider expansion. But frankly, those things do not exist.

“And there is another group of people who would say you shouldn’t have state playoffs of any kind, that there is enough competition with league and sectional titles--and that’s probably a good argument.”

Ray Plutko, Southern Section athletic commissioner and a strong proponent of state tournaments, was a member of the study committee on expanding state playoffs to other sports, and he remembers that “volleyball, softball and baseball were high up on the list” but that much of that study has been outdated.

“The idea then was to identify some sports that would be conducive to state championships in the future, if they wanted to go that route, to see how many sports might be added and how much spectator interest there was in them,” Plutko said.

He agreed with Byrnes that there are problems with expansion. “Due to the vast geography of the state and lengthy school calendars, I don’t see any expansion at this point,” he said. He also pointed out that in other states, teams might travel 200 miles to get to a central site for a state tournament. “We don’t have that luxury,” he said.

Plutko said he has been a teacher, athletic director and coach, and that he considers state tournaments educational experiences. “Athletes have the opportunity to meet on an informal basis the day before a contest, perhaps at a barbecue together,” he said. “They can exchange a handshake at state track meets, and in basketball they even live in the same hotel for two days.

“As long as it remains a part of education, as long as it has its place and proper perspective, I think it’s part of the overall picture of education.”

But he added that expense is a problem. “We haven’t worked out a system where we can subsidize (meal allowances and hotels) athletes in wrestling and track as we do in other state championship sports.

“We just added a subsidy for team sports (girls’ volleyball and basketball) within the last two years, and we’re trying to branch it out” and to develop a reserve fund.

Plutko also said that Southern Section officials have talked to the Los Angeles Olympic Committee about making a financial contribution to state tournaments and that another source to underwrite travel might be airlines, which might donate plane tickets for athletes.

“I don’t think there’s a need for (expansion) right now, and, in terms of the various sections, I don’t think there is a cry for it,” he said. “Basketball and volleyball are so new (that) we have to refine those, to concentrate on those areas and maximize the benefits for schools instead of adding more sports.”

Superintendent Robert Packer of the Duarte Unified School District, a member of the Southern Section Executive Committee, echoed the comments of Cheffers, Byrnes and Plutko.

“To try to go to a broader state format would meet with resistance in the Southern Section,” Packer said. “I think we would all concur, as Ray (Plutko) said, that we should get our current format healthy before we expand it.”

He said: “California is a long narrow state split in two by a mountain range, the Sierras, which makes travel very difficult for a state playoff format and expensive, extremely expensive.”

There is also risk involved, Packer said, recalling that he had recently watched the film, “Twelve O’Clock High,” about a U.S. bomber squadron in World War II. He said that a line in the movie about the planes could be applied to team buses and state tournaments: “Every time you go up, you have one more chance of not coming back.”

“School administrators worry a great deal about that,” he said.

Expense is also a big problem in a big state, he said. “We have a state office with 10 sections and 10 commissioners hired by 10 different bodies. The state office operates at the pleasure of the 10 sections. So the state office is not in the business of fund raising; it is left to the sections and their devices for fund raising.”

“The Southern Section is in itself larger than about two-thirds of other state organizations. (It) is so large that to extend the playoff format to the state is really, in a sense, just gilding the lily. As for basketball (championships), the Northern California people get excited about (them), but our people are not that excited.”

One Southern California coach who was very excited about the state basketball tournament was Carolyn Montgomery, whose Compton High School girls--most of them juniors--finished the 1983-84 season with a 26-1 record, the loss coming in the state final by eight points to Buena.

In the 1984-85 season, Compton was the Southern Section 4-A champion with a 26-0 record, was ranked first in the state by the Cal-Hi Sports newsletter and seventh in the nation by USA Today. But because of a one-year boycott of the state playoffs in the Southern Section, Montgomery’s team--including Converse All- American Kim Thompson--didn’t get to play in the state tournament.

The Division I state title was won by Point Loma of San Diego, which extended its winning streak to 57 games in the title game. Montgomery would have liked a chance to end Point Loma’s streak at 56.

“I was very disappointed,” Montgomery said about the boycott. “I knew all my kids (in 1984) were juniors, and that we would have a very good chance in a state tournament.

“I feel we need the exposure as much as any sport. The more competition, the better you can be.”

Montgomery acknowledged the financial difficulties of expanding state tournaments. “I don’t think the kids mind the long season, but money is always going to be a problem,” she said.

It was a problem this year for Hal Harkness, Franklin High School track coach and president of the Los Angeles Coaches Assn.

Harkness said that the Los Angeles high schools usually have money, derived from football and basketball playoff revenues, to defray the cost of traveling to regional state championships for wrestlers and for track athletes.

He said that this year, however, there was no money in the kitty, and that the track athletes had to go to Sacramento, and not Bakersfield as they had for last year’s state meet.

In February, he went to the Los Angeles Board of Education. “They were kind enough to help us out this spring,” he said, adding that the board came up with $40,000 to finance the travel expenses of track athletes who went to the two-day state meet in Sacramento and $6,000 for a smaller group of wrestlers who competed in a one-day meet at Stockton.

Harkness said that he doesn’t “see any move at this point to expand the playoffs, and I’ve heard of nothing that would realistically foresee it because any activity you would add would essentially be a non-revenue activity.”

Though football would be a revenue activity, he said, it would be unrealistic to have state football championships because the season would run through students’ holidays and into January. Everyone interviewed echoed those comments, and some also mentioned that extending the football season would increase the risk of injuries.

L.A. Coaches Assn. vice president Larry Wein, who is also the football coach and dean of students at Westchester High School, said: “You run into all sorts of problems with state championships. They’re good in states that are small, but they don’t have the sectional competition of California. We have such a large section (49 schools), and there are so many CIF sections that there is enough competition to satisfy everybody.”

Wein said he used to coach varsity baseball at Dorsey High. “There would be some talk about a state tournament when you got to the city playoffs,” he said. “But it was just conversation, and I don’t think there was any kind of movement for state championships. In football, you hardly every hear any talk about state championships.”

There is some support for adding baseball from coaches with winning programs. The idea is backed by Chuck Ice, coach of Santa Monica’s Crossroads School, this year’s baseball champion in the Southern Section’s Small Schools Division; by Jeff Shimizu, who coached Venice High to its second straight City 3-A title, and by Dennis Paul, whose Diamond Bar High team won the Southern Section 2-A championship.

Said Ice: “I think it would be very interesting and very good for baseball in the state. The problem is that baseball finishes so close to graduation, and it would be tough to fit the playoffs into the schedules of individuals.”

Said Paul: “We’re in a changing situation because the school year is increasing. We’ve lengthened the school year by one week now, and if the trend continues, there’s going to be time at the end of the year when a state championship could take place.

“I would support a state tournament; certainly that would promote our sport. I could think of a lot worse things you could do than have a state playoff and championship. I may be talking in a euphoric state too, but I’d like to keep playing.”

Said Shimizu: “If we could coordinate the season with the CIF, it could be done--definitely. If you talk to any baseball coach who is running a good program, I think you’d find he would love to have them. It may be a bad time of the year, with finals, graduation and everyone being tired. But they would not have to spread out the playoffs so much.”

But Mickey McNamee, San Marino High School baseball coach and president of the Southern California Baseball Coaches Assn., said he has found there is “very little sense among the coaches to promote baseball on a statewide level.”

McNamee, whose 1977 team won the Southern Section 2-A championship and whose squad last year took the 1-A title, said the attendance for this year’s 4-A and 3-A Southern Section semifinals at Blair Field in Long Beach and for the finals, a doubleheader at Anaheim Stadium, “was little more than 7,000 for two days.

“If we could put between 15,000 and 20,000 spectators in a major league stadium for a high school series, I think we would have something feasible. But most games are in the afternoon, which decreases the pool of attendance.

“Before going statewide, we have to try to show off our game in Southern California and try to promote our game within our own section before we try to go on a grander scale.”

DR