VAST REALM : CIF Southern Section a Big Force in Developing High School Sports in California for the Past 75 Years

The life and times of the Southern Section, the largest of the 10 groups that make up the California Interscholastic Federation, have not been unlike its geographical boundaries. After a level start near San Luis Obispo and the Pacific Ocean, there is a deep drop around the bottom of the San Joaquin Valley, an impressive climb along the Eastern Sierra, and a few gouges out of the middle and the bottom for the City and San Diego sections.

The Southern Section? It’s often ragged and sometimes difficult to follow, but it’s still an impressive body.

This year, as the Southern Section celebrates its 75th anniversary, it stands as large as ever, with 479 high schools under its domain as the seventh-largest prep organization, regional or statewide, in the country. It also has a whopping 335 more schools than any other section in California, an imposing fact and the main reason that the nine other sections sometimes feel as though they’re dealing with an octopus. That, and a perceived let-them-eat cake attitude by the previous commissioner, Ray Plutko.

Break up the Southern Section? Some have tried, as recently as three years ago. Now, it doesn’t look as if it will happen for a long while, if at all.

The section is a paradox, at once exuding vitality and an ability to adjust to new trends and come up with fresh money-making concepts, while at the same time showing age for all to see like a shriveled old man, thanks to a rule book that even administrators concede is outdated.

Yet at 75, the Cerritos-based Southern Section is, in many ways, just reaching its prime.

Seth Van Patten, a teacher, arrived in the Los Angeles area in December of 1900 and found, among other things, what then passed for high school sports. There were no constitution or by-laws for the teams, no eligibility rules. School administrators had no role in the management of athletics.

“If the school was so fortunate as to have a man on the faculty who knew something about athletics, the boys got some help,” he wrote years later in his unofficial history of high school athletics in the area. “Some schools got help from young men of the town. Sometimes the town bum took part in the management.”

Track and field meets at the time were run by local colleges and the YMCA, apparently, without much success. A number of people wanted to file complaints over the way high school competition was run, but Van Patten, who became president of the Los Angeles County League that consisted of Los Angeles Poly, Pasadena, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Whittier and his own Los Angeles High, refused. If they did not have the guts to run the events properly themselves, he told the league coaches, they did not deserve a championship meet.

A second failed attempt at organizing became the starting point for the Southern Section. A constitution was drawn up in 1913 for a body known as the Southern California Interscholastic Athletic Council. In March of 1914, when an initiative passed to form the four-region California Interscholastic Federation for the state as a whole, the local organization became the Southern Section.

About 20 schools were involved in 1913. By the late 1920s, the group had grown so much that restructuring was necessary, and by 1930, a full-time commissioner was deemed necessary.

Van Patten got the job, a post he held until he retired in 1951 at 77. The man who is referred to as the father of the Southern Section was known then as the Czar, because of his toughness and by-the-book attitude.

“(The nickname) didn’t bother him,” said Don Thomas, Van Patten’s grandson who worked for the Southern Section from 1949-51 and is now an assistant principal at El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills and a prominent administrator in City athletics. “Nothing really bothered him too much, at least on the surface. He’d sit there and let guys yap at him, the coaches and all, and not get real ruffled.”

When Van Patten retired, the section tabbed Bill Russell, then 35, as the new commissioner.

“The change was so easy,” Russell, now retired in Santa Barbara, recalled. “The CIF itself--the organization, the schools and the administrators--wouldn’t allow a neophyte to come in and upset what was already in line.”

Russell didn’t. He spent four years as head of the section, then was asked to become CIF commissioner. He accepted, against the recommendation of some in the Southern Section’s executive council, who predicted that the Southern Section position would be “a bigger job some day than running the state office will be.”

Ken Fagans took over then, just a few years before the start of the post-World War II baby-boom. He had a part-time secretary and a student helper from UCLA.

Fagans drafted his own staff for the up-keep of the small office at the Helms Athletic Foundation on Venice Boulevard--his wife and two sons, who most every Sunday from September through June would clean inside and cut the lawn. The section had 220 schools, 50 of them in San Diego County, but the operation still wasn’t extravagant.

Fagans revolutionized the football playoff system in the section. Previously, seedings were done the March before the season. Fagans said recently that allowed the general council to keep a firm grip on what went on. The new commissioner decided, however, that maybe it would be better to play the regular season first and then figure out the matchups.

Then, as now, football was the key money-making sport, and Fagans realized it. He realized it so strongly, in fact, that he occasionally rigged the coin flips to determine home-field advantages at playoff time, trying to make sure the teams with the biggest stadiums or best fan support won the flips. If the results went against what he thought was best for the section, he’d re-toss. That happened, behind closed doors, maybe once or twice a year, he admitted, all in the name of trying to get the best crowd for the games.

“This was in the early days when we really needed the money,” he said. “To have one team travel many miles when the other school had no worthwhile place to play, something like that would come into play.”

Fagans could have tossed the coin 1,000 times and still not come up with a better scenario than what occurred when Mickey Flynn and Anaheim played Randy Meadows and Downey for the 1956 football championship in the Coliseum. That was the turning point, possibly for the entire section. The game turned an unheard-of profit of about $45,000. There was a crowd of 41,383, most of whom poured through the turnstiles as part of massive walk-up sales at the first night title game.

Fagans retired in 1975 and left his successor, Tom Byrnes, with 490 schools, even after the San Diego schools broke off and formed their own section. When Byrnes took over, he found Fagans’ signature everywhere. Fagans had written every check for salaries and reimbursements that came out of the headquarters in his 21 years as commissioner. Such was his meticulous detail in overseeing the organization.

“Kenny is the king, as far as the Southern Section goes,” said Stan Thomas, the current commissioner. “Without him, the section would not have developed to where it is now. . . . At that time and era, he did more for this section than anyone (else) could have ever done.”

The staff under Fagans was almost as impressive:

Assistant Tom Byrnes, who succeeded him, is now the state commissioner. Margaret Davis is highly regarded as the state’s associate commissioner. Don Andersen later became sports information director at USC and public relations director with the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League. Kendall Webb is commissioner of the 72-school, 28-year-old San Diego Section. Plutko, after serving for six years as head of the Southern Section, is commissioner of the Colorado High School Activities Assn. Tom Morgan is executive director of the Shearson-Lehman Brothers Andy Williams Open in La Jolla.

Byrnes was a rising star all along. He graduated from Occidental College in 1960 and, at 22, became a teacher, coach and athletic director at Moorpark High. After a stint on active duty with the National Guard, he became a football coach at Valencia of Placentia--and the youngest coach in Orange County. He was also the youngest administrator the Southern Section has ever had. He was 37 when he was named commissioner in 1975.

After five years, he moved to Fullerton to head the CIF. That brought the section into the 1980s.

RAY’S EMPIRE

The section flourished under Plutko, at least in numbers. The sudden increase of girls’ sports almost doubled the section’s work, and school expenses, but Plutko oversaw the introduction of corporate sponsors into the high school arena, an idea Byrnes suggested earlier. Plutko’s business mind laid the groundwork for what has turned into the common staple of outside monetary support for other sections and the CIF as a whole.

At the same time, though, relationships with the rest of the CIF deteriorated, and morale in the office in Cerritos wasn’t exactly sky high, either. Insiders talk of meetings that offered mostly robot-like delegation and little discussion. An organization that prided itself on innovation suddenly had little, unless it came from the top.

“If it wasn’t Ray’s idea, it wasn’t an idea,” said one long-time staffer who asked not to be identified. “ . . . Ray had an empire going. It was always the Ray Plutko show.”

Plutko’s persona was secretive, and that was never more evident than in January of 1986, when he took the job in Colorado.

His decision to leave caught most by surprise. Several long-time co-workers and, they thought, friends found out the day before it was made official that Plutko was even considering leaving.

According to co-workers, Plutko told the few who did know of his plans to lie if they were asked about an impending change. Bill Clark, then and now an administrator in the office, was one of several who did, saying that he saw Plutko at a high school basketball game on a night Plutko was in Denver ironing out final details of the Colorado job.

“I’m a private person,” Plutko said recently from his office in Aurora, Colo. “I carried that image through to my final decision. I didn’t want people to try and talk me out of it.”

In the CIF setup, the Southern Section, based on its overwhelming number of schools and students, carries 24 of 99 votes in the state federated council meetings. It would have had more, based on a system proportionate to the number of schools and students, but no section can have more than twice as many votes as the next biggest.

The let-them-eat-cake perception was something Plutko never seemed to deny, even today.

“I’ll go to my grave believing, and I think every commissioner before me would say the same thing, that the Southern Section is the CIF, period,” he said. “I don’t care what anybody says. We were innovative. We weren’t afraid to do new things. We had a lot of great people who knew their roles. We were so far ahead that we should have been proud. Sometimes it rubbed people the wrong way, but there was nothing I could do about that.”

When he left, there were fences to mend.

THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR

Plutko’s successor, 56-year-old Thomas, is applauded, both within the office and without, for restoring morale and bringing the Southern Section back onto the CIF “team.”

“The last eight years, the Southern Section really has made an effort to reach out to the community, to the schools, to the sponsors, to the newspapers,” said Larry Zucker, a Southern Section administrator in charge of corporate sponsorships. “Stan Thomas is a real people-person, and that has been his mark so far.

“The staff has never been closer. We have a lot more freedom and there is a lot more delegation--this is your thing, do it. . . . Ray was more innovative, Ray had a better business sense. But Ray was not able to make the right personal approach.

“A good example about Ray is that he wasn’t worried about what the other sections thought about getting stepped on by the bigger Southern Section. It would have been more like, ‘I’m doing what’s best for our schools and I’m not worried about the rest of you.’ Then when you’d come to the state meeting to vote on something on the future, they’d remember that. The other issues that were important to our schools then, forget it.”

Said Hal Harkness, who took over as director of athletics for the 49-school City Section a couple of months after Thomas became head of the Southern Section: “From what I’ve gathered, there has been a noticeable change since Stan Thomas became commissioner. Prior to Stan’s leadership, the section was really judged and seen as a ramrod. It was kind of, ‘To heck with what the other sections want.’ . . . I think they view themselves now as 1 of the 10 sections. (Thomas) has brought sensitivity and the ability to be mindful and communicative and be responsive to the needs of the other sections. “

Thomas was the darkhorse among the three finalists for the job. Compared to Dean Crowley and Margaret Davis, he had the fewest direct ties to the Southern Section and the least name recognition. But now, after helping avert a strike by football officials in his first days in office and traveling throughout the section to league meetings to get feedback from coaches and athletic directors, the former principal at Foothill of Santa Ana and administrator with the Tustin Unified School District is seen in a positive light.

The section Thomas is in charge of, however, still is open to a great deal of criticism these days.

For starters, there was the botched disqualification during the girls’ volleyball playoffs.

After Maranatha of Sierra Madre turned itself in for a possible violation, the section called St. Anthony of Long Beach and told the Saints they would get the forfeit victory in the semifinals and advance to the 1-A title match. But later that day, just before the end of school, the section called St. Anthony and said it would have to play after all, that the forfeit had been overturned on appeal.

Basically, the Southern Section jumped the gun in telling St. Anthony it would advance before giving Maranatha an appeal, and one official admitted as much. That night, Maranatha won in three straight games and went on to take the championship.

“The CIF (Southern Section) demands perfection from coaches,” St. Anthony Coach Polly Pope said at the time. “If you don’t follow their rules, you’re in trouble. What they did to us shows they aren’t acting in accordance with their own demands of perfection.”

Then came the state basketball playoffs.

The Southern Section established a qualifying standard, ruling that teams would have to reach at least the division final to be considered for entry. As a result, Rolling Hills, regarded as one of the best 3-A teams with a 19-7 record in tough competition, was left behind after dropping a triple-overtime decision in the semifinals to the eventual division champion.

The score card: The Southern Section put 23 teams into the state tournament. The San Diego Section, with one-seventh the number of schools, had 27.

The Southern Section doesn’t support its own, some coaches claimed.

That problem has been somewhat remedied by a recent realignment of the Southern Section playoff system.

In any event, the basketball case was minor compared to the massive problem that dogged the office for most of the school year: litigation.

Want to get a reaction around the Southern Section? Just mention a possible lack of due process in proceedings, and watch administrators and attorneys brace themselves.

The case of the Pasadena Muir basketball team being readmitted to the playoffs, thanks to a temporary restraining order, turned out not to be a defeat for the Southern Section but it was a public black eye, nonetheless.

The most telling example of how careful officials have become against being taken to court, however, is the far less publicized incident of Baldwin Park’s attempt to stave off a realignment proposal in the Mt. San Antonio area of the East San Gabriel Valley during March and April.

Baldwin Park was moved from the Montview League to the Sierra, and, in time, claimed that proper procedures weren’t followed at the releaguing meeting. That’s all they had to say.

New meeting, Thomas ruled.

“Two years ago, I probably would have said, ‘Those are the guys (the realignment committee) who make the decisions and if you want to appeal, we’ll deal with that,’ ” Thomas said recently. “I might even be able to pull that off now. But I’m not going to risk it because of the Muir case. We’re going to give more due process than people can believe.”

FORGIVE AND REMEMBER?

There is a price to pay for taking the Southern Section to court. The section views such a move as a personal affront.

“I really feel strongly that when you accept membership in this organization, you accept responsibility. . . .” Thomas said. “I think it’s very, very serious that a school would litigate the section or the state.

“What they are doing, in essence, is abdicating the by-laws of this organization. If you have three levels to confront with a problem--the commissioner, the executive committee, the state--that should be it if you are a member in good standing.”

So obviously, there are several members not in good standing. And the section remembers them.

“We’re not vindictive,” Thomas said. “We apply rules consistently with the judgment of the executive committee.

“But our section as a whole remembers. We remember the court cases and why we’re in court.

They remember the long, costly battle with Huntington Beach Ocean View a few years ago. They remember hearings with Santa Ana Mater Dei over a disputed student transfer.

And they remember the way the Simi Valley Unified School District squared off with them in March over the Royal High soccer team, another messy situation.

That controversy centered on a trip to the Soviet Union with the U.S. Junior Olympic team last December by star Cam Rast. All would have been fine, except that Rast didn’t get Southern Section approval, as he had for another trip to play in Guatemala. The violation didn’t become public until after the Highlanders won the 4-A title.

Royal officials admitted an error in paperwork and the Southern Section responded by “recommending” that three administrators be permanently relieved of further athletic duties at the school. The section did not, however, strip Royal of the title, which was within its jurisdiction.

“Certainly, they have every right to put us on probation and could sanction us in other ways,” John Duncan, superintendent of the Simi Valley Unified School District, said at the time. “But they are totally out of their purview when they begin to dictate how we handle personnel, saying who we should hire and fire. That is the legal right of the board. They should give us recommendations that are within their rights.”

Thomas responded: “We are under siege. Today, attorneys and judges are making decisions that administrators and principals should be making. Schools seem willing to forget they have accepted our system and go directly to the courts.

“I did my very best to come up with something that was palatable to both sides, but apparently that’s not good enough. If you want to be a Southern Section member you have to accept the ruling of the executive committee. If not, maybe you want to play intramurals.”

In the end, the school district accepted the penalties.

Only on the rarest occasions do schools drop out of the section and play on their own--intramurals. The section also has the option of dropping schools, but that hasn’t happened. Yet.

The Southern Section has no jurisdiction to fire coaches or athletic directors, or, in the case of Royal, to have administrators barred from involvement with the sports programs. But through the years, the section hands have become very efficient at putting pressure on the schools to do it for them.

The choice is to cooperate or deal with the consequences--lack of support from your own section, programs being put on probation and kept out of the playoffs. . . .

Or was it only a coincidence that the Mater Dei basketball team won the 5-A title, the top level, for the fourth straight year and was shipped to Fresno for the first round of the state playoffs, whereas no other Division I team from the Southern or City sections, including runners-up in two divisions, had to leave Los Angeles County?

MONEY MAKES THE PREPS GO ‘ROUND

In the 1979-80 school year, about 180 people gathered at Southern Methodist University in Dallas for a three-day seminar on sports promotions. Every person there represented a college, except one--Ray Plutko.

The Southern Section sent him there to look into pioneering the combination of corporate sponsorships and high schools. Judging by what has developed in the last eight years, it was money well spent.

The budget for the Southern Section, a nonprofit organization, was $927,000 for the 1987-88 school year, and only two sports, football and basketball, generate revenue with playoffs. There are other financial sources--dues, the selling of TV-radio rights, bank interest--but 25% of the income comes from sponsors. That saves each school roughly $500 in dues.

Zucker, the only one of the three administrators under Thomas and Associate Commissioner Crowley who doesn’t deal directly with the running of events or the legislation of the section, was hired in 1980 to help deal with the effects of Proposition 13, to help the section raise money without having to solicit the schools that had been dealt a financial blow a few years earlier.

The list of Southern Section financial supporters, either for single sporting events or year-round support, in eight years would make most Olympic committees proud: Ford, Coca-Cola, Wilson, Gatorade, Round Table pizza, Puma, and Herff Jones, to name a few. All told, 13 companies were part of the cartel last school year, with others offering non-monetary support, such as Adohr Farms and the Dodgers, who combine on a sportsmanship program.

“I don’t think the schools realize what the corporate sponsorship program means to them,” Zucker said. “They don’t really understand that the money has to be there one way or another and that the sponsors help them.”

But aren’t some corporations targeting the wrong audience?

“The people at Ford don’t expect 400 people to walk out of a basketball game and go buy a car,” Zucker said. “A lot of it is public relations. A lot of it is community relations. A company like Ford, they’re using a certain percentage of their profits to put back into the community. They think what we do is important.”

Thomas, like Plutko, is very particular, though, about sponsors. There can be no cigarette or alcohol advertisements. Nothing even questionable. Wholesome, family products only need apply, and the section has said, “Thanks, but no thanks” when approached in the past.

Thomas also is careful to make sure he is not selling out when he is selling program advertisements, arena banners and public-address plugs at games to corporations.

“I know where I am when I take Reebok’s money,” he said of a relationship in general that makes him uneasy. “That’s no secret.”

So, once an agreement has been reached, the name of the event may change--the Southern Section-Reebok-Round Table track and field championships were held May 21--but the organization will not give up control of the competition and how it is run. That difference in philosophy ended the relationship between the section and McDonald’s, which wanted the 1980 basketball finals at the Sports Arena to be “their” event. Plutko saw the section’s control slipping about the time he saw Ronald McDonald shooting free throws during one break in play.

The commissioner went to Zucker immediately with a firm message: Get Ronald off the court.

“It’s our event and we’re not going to make it a circus,” Plutko told Zucker.

A couple of years later, Zucker approached Plutko with an idea that would have radically changed the face of football in the Southern Section: Offer Ford the opportunity to have its name on the championship games and rename each of the 10 conferences after a car model, in exchange for a 10-year deal at $50,000 per, an enormous sum for one sponsor.

Plutko didn’t take the proposal seriously, however, so Zucker dropped it.

“I thought it was a very innovative way of bringing money to the schools,” Zucker says. “There have been a lot of ideas like that.”

LOCATION

From 1959 through the spring of ‘65, the Southern Section was based on Washington Boulevard near La Cienega, having used some of the money generated by the football and basketball playoffs to pay for the land. But after three robberies within a year, Fagans and Co. pulled up stakes. Not long afterward, two people were killed at a liquor store across the street during the Watts riots.

The Bellflower Unified School District suggested a piece of property in Cerritos, at the corner of Artesia and Studebaker. There was talk of a couple of freeways going through the area, but the intersection of the 91 and 605 was only in the early planning stages.

The Southern Section took the deal at $300 a year and has remained in that location ever since--paying incredibly low rent on a three-quarter acre plot of land belonging to the Artesia Bloomfield Carmenita Unified School District and nearby Gahr High. Yes, the section rents from one of the schools it governs.

More than a few have noticed, especially after Crowley, who spent 10 years at Gahr as a coach, counselor and assistant principal, joined the section. This old joke has made the rounds:

“If the Southern Section were to sanction Gahr, Gahr would take away the Southern Section’s parking privileges.”

Said Crowley, the respected associate commissioner: “I don’t see it as a conflict of interest. We’ve declared some of their kids ineligible in the past and asked them to correct things. We’ve all come from schools in the section--Bill from El Dorado, Karen (Hellyer, an administrator) from University and Stan from Foothill.”

If he had it to do over again, Fagans, who lives on Balboa Island, might not make the same move for the section headquarters. The possible conflict, however, has nothing to do with it.

“On the executive committee, there were eight superintendents and they all thought it was a great idea,” Fagans said. “In hindsight, we may have been better off buying five acres in Orange County and selling it later for a big profit. But it’s been a good deal for all concerned.”

75 YEARS FROM NOW . . .

What you see is probably what you’ll get for a while, at least in terms of leadership. Of the five principles at the office--commissioner Thomas, associate commissioner Crowley, and administrators Clark, Hellyer and Zucker--all are 56 or younger, so age won’t prompt a change.

But can the section offer the same stability to its member schools?

The current size, which also does not figure to change noticeably, offers benefits and problems: More athletes mean better competition and more section administrators and more coaches make for better instruction.

But travel from Avalon to Big Bear for a softball playoff game, or El Monte in the San Gabriel Valley to El Centro, 125 miles southeast of San Diego, can be downright exhausting on the day of a game. Moreover, some parents and coaches of lower-division schools have complained of being short-changed by the section, at times playing basketball championship games Friday night in a high school gym while “everyone else gets to play at the Sports Arena.”

Now, with the addition of three more divisions for basketball, it means more teams in the playoffs, but also more that will be shut out of the Sports Arena. The options are to play several games at separate sites, or use Thursday and Saturday for championships weekend at the Sports Arena while the City plays on Friday.

It all makes for another year in the life--a victory here, egg on the face there, a new problem to adapt to. But after 75 years, everyone is probably used to it.

As Van Patten wrote in 1951:

“During the 15 years from 1935 to 1950, the C.I.F., So. Sect., was both down and up. The athletic program was well supported by all our member schools even through the war years of 1942-45. During those war years, finances were always at a low ebb. The bottom of the financial barrel was being scraped every month. From 1946 to 1951 the C.I.F., So. Sect. has been in a flourishing condition. It is one of the best known, and most useful school organizations in the State. The future of the C.I.F., Southern Section, looks rosey.”

SOUTHERN SECTION COMMISSIONERS

Name Years Seth Van Patten 1930-51 Bill Russell 1951-54 Ken Fagans 1954-75 Tom Byrnes 1975-80 Ray Plutko 1980-86 Stan Thomas 1986-

THE CIF SECTIONS

Section Office Loc. Schls Commissioner Central Fresno 70 Merritt Gilbert Central Coast Sunnyvale 112 Larry Rice L.A. City Los Angeles 49 Hal Harkness North Coast Diablo 144 Paul Gaddini Northern Chico 67 Darold Adamson Oakland Oakland 6 Lou Jones Sac-Joaquin Modesto 131 Clarke C. Hoover San Diego San Diego 72 Kendall Webb San Francisco San Francisco 13 Anne Heinline Southern Cerritos 479 Stan Thomas

NOTE: School figures as of September, 1987