HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL PLAYOFFS : Releaguing Means Never Having to Play Banning

For City Section football teams, it is like playing a weird card game with a 49-card deck. A school figures to lose every time it has to play one of two aces.

A releaguing committee of administrators and coaches periodically reshuffles the City’s 49 schools into leagues. The object, coaches admit, is to avoid being placed in a 4-A league, where sooner or later a team has to face the aces: Banning and Carson.

Only in the 3-A or 2-A does a regular team stand a chance of calling itself champion. Banning or Carson have won 10 of the last 11 City titles and are favored to meet in the final this season.

“When they last releagued in 1983, it was a big circus,” Granada Hills assistant coach Tom Harp said. “Everybody put in their 2 cents worth and wanted to stay down in a lower division, where they could win.”

Hal Harkness, newly appointed City Section athletics commissioner, is not looking forward to his first round of releaguing, which will occur after the 1987 season.

“It’s difficult to come up with something equitable and fair,” he said. “Give me a solution. If you had your druthers, you’d rather not play Banning or Carson. Everyone has an opinion as to how it should be done but there is no consensus of opinion.”

Harkness is right about the abundance of opinions. But there is a thread of logic running through many of them.

Said Sylmar Coach Tom Richards: “Form neighborhood leagues, then at end of the season, rate the leagues and make the playoff pairings. And chuck the 2-A.”

Said Kennedy Coach Bob Francola: “I’m in favor of the neighborhood concept. Throw the 2-A out the window. I think we should all be in one big kettle.”

Said Banning Coach Chris Ferragamo: “Lump everyone into one league. Forget the 4-A, 3-A and 2-A. And restructure leagues to play local schools.”

Coaches agree that keeping geographic proximity in mind when forming leagues would increase attendance and fuel rivalries.

“We could have a great league in the north Valley,” Harp said. “Reseda should be in with us, Kennedy, Cleveland and San Fernando.”

But Reseda currently is in the 2-A Pac 8 League.

“Reseda in the 2-A is the joke of the century,” Harp said. “Their kids are as big as on any team in the Valley.”

Reseda Coach Joel Schaeffer was on the last releaguing committee. While admitting that politics came into play, he said the committee weighed several factors.

“We had five meetings totaling eight or nine hours,” Schaeffer said. “The three basic factors are enrollment, won-loss record and geographic location. But it gets very political. What ends up happening is there are too many cooks stirring the broth.”

Schaeffer agreed that many schools try to flee the shadow of Banning and Carson. But he claimed Reseda is an exception.

“Schools come in crying about how they are in a down cycle and have to be dropped to the 2-A,” he said. “There are a lot of people hiding in the 2-A. Reseda will probably be moved up but people have to remember that Reseda struggled through the 1970s and the 2-A concept brought the school back to respectability.”

The motives won’t change during the next releaguing unless Banning and Carson are eliminated from the City Section. Putting them in a so-called super-league with the best three or four Southern Section teams has been discussed.

“We play Long Beach Poly and some of the other good Southern Section teams in nonleague games anyway,” Ferragamo said. “A super-league would be fine with me.”

Said Southern Section administrator Bill Clark: “It’s an interesting thought but no one has formally approached the Southern Section with the idea.”

And the City Section won’t be offering Banning and Carson to the Southern Section in the near future, either.

“There are other alternatives to divorcing teams from a school district,” Harkness said. “Destroying the integrity of City football is not the intent here.”