Despite Uncertainty, JCs Prepare New Leagues

Six months before athletic conferences in California community colleges are officially realigned, the final touches are being administered.

Meetings are held. Schedules are being completed. Travel arrangements are being made.

For the nine schools in the Los Angeles Community College District, there may not be many--or any--sports contested during the 1986-87 academic year.

But the planning continues.

“We’re going ahead in the new leagues and having meetings and preparing budgets and so forth like nothing has happened,” said George Goff, athletic director at Valley College. “We can’t stand idly by and be caught unprepared.

“We’re going on these are normal times, even though it’s not that. There is a lot of apprehension.”

Athletic programs in the district face a period of uncertainty as they look to 1986-87. If the district goes ahead with its plans to lay off 39 physical education instructors and fire its part-time coaches, more than 70% of its programs would be lost.

Goff and other athletic officials have said they will be more certain of their fate within the next three weeks. At that time, given deadlines for notification of layoff, the negotiating between district and faculty representatives will be all but over.

In the meantime, the district’s athletic programs are planning for a realignment that may never take place.

State athletic officials are also aware that the Los Angeles schools may be forced to drop a majority of their sports unless a solution is arrived at within the next three weeks. But they said the fate of their realignment will not be affected.

“Obviously, the Los Angeles Community College District is the world’s largest district with nine colleges and we would feel their loss,” said Stu Van Horn, assistant athletic commissioner for the California Assn. of Community Colleges, the state governing body. “We would grieve over their loss. We certainly recognize the impact of the Los Angeles schools in the development of our athletic program.

“But it would not mean the demise of any of our athletic conferences regardless of what happens in the Los Angeles district. We’re hoping that nothing happens, but the conferences in Southern California are not made or broken by the Los Angeles schools.

“We feel if something negative did come out of the discussions in the Los Angeles district that it would be a great loss for the community. We would be effected, but it wouldn’t create chaos or anything like that.”

Under the new alignment, there will be five conferences in both Southern and Northern California. Many of the conferences will retain the same name--and many of the same schools--as before the realignment.

In football, there will be only four conferences.

“That’s because there are only 75 schools that offer football in the state, and as many as 92 that offer basketball,” Van Horn said.

In mandating the construction of new conferences, the state made only one request.

“We just asked that they not include the word ‘Valley’ in any of the conferences,” Van Horn said. “There are so many valleys in the state that we lose track of where we’re dealing with.”

Other than that, the schools aligned themselves at will, Van Horn said. Athletic representatives were allowed to join forces as they pleased at a one-day regional meeting held last May.

Thus, a 17-school league--the new Southern California Conference--was created, while other conferences have as few as 10 teams.

“During the past couple of years, the Commission on Athletics, as any other governing body will do, has evaluated its conference structure,” Van Horn said. “Athletic administrators at all community colleges were asked to become involved in what is known as the self-determination process.

“That process was established to enable colleges with similar philosophies, similar geographic locations and similar competitive strengths to band together. The idea was the let teams that want to play each other play each other.”

The plan worked, to a degree.

“I think the process they set up was good,” Goff said. “But it sounds so wonderful and simple, and it isn’t all that simple. It’s still a hard process to decide.”

As a result, Valley and Pierce, the two largest Los Angeles schools, will not be in the same league.

Originally, both were set to join the Western State Conference. But when Bakersfield and other large and isolated schools decided to join, Valley decided to leave.

“There was a tremendous travel problem in that conference,” Goff said. “It all started out as a great conference, but maybe it got a little too strong and the distances became too great.”

Pierce College decided to remain in the WSC, meaning it will travel to Bakersfield and to San Luis Obispo to play Cuesta. Athletic director Bob O’Connor agreed that the travel could be a problem.

“It throws a crimp into our transportation budget,” O’Connor said. “We were ecstatic about the other league with Valley in it, but we’re still satisfied with where we are.”

Notes

The five community colleges in the Valley area--Pierce, Valley, Moorpark, Mission and College of the Canyons--will be aligned within two conferences beginning in September.

The Western State Conference will include Pierce, Moorpark, Canyons, Glendale, Allan Hancock, Bakersfield, Cuesta, Oxnard, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica and Ventura. Three of the schools--Canyons, Cuesta and Oxnard--will not field football teams.

The Southern California Conference will include 17 teams and will be split into two divisions, which have not yet been determined. Valley and Mission--in addition to the six other Los Angeles schools other than Pierce--will be included.

In football, the SCC will field 12 teams.