Scheduling Woes Seen in Foothill Plan : Releaguing: Formation of five-team league next fall would lead to problems in filling bye weeks during football season.

Athletic directors of the newly aligned Foothill League met this week to hash out the lone fault they have found with the recently approved Southern Section releaguing plan: football scheduling.

The current six-team Foothill League will be disbanded next fall and replaced with a five-team configuration that includes current members Burbank, Burroughs and High highs, plus Canyon and Saugus.

Canyon and Saugus, current Golden League members, will be replaced by Highland and Littlerock, which will join Antelope Valley, Palmdale, Quartz Hill and Ridgecrest Burroughs in the newly aligned Golden League. Highland and Littlerock, both of which opened in 1989, are playing their first season of varsity football this fall.

In other changes for the two-year releaguing cycle that will begin in the fall of ‘92, the Southern Section approved a switch involving Fillmore and Moorpark in which Moorpark will replace Fillmore in the Frontier League and Fillmore will take Moorpark’s place in the Tri-Valley.

The Southern Section also ratified a complicated restructuring of Catholic Athletic Assn. schools that re-forms the now-defunct Del Rey League, reconfigures the Mission League and dissolves the San Fernando League and splits those teams into newly aligned Santa Fe and El Camino Real leagues.

Later in the school year, the Southern Section will assign playoff designations for all sports.

The Santa Clarita Valley schools--Canyon, Hart and Saugus--welcomed the new Foothill League enthusiastically, saying the inclusion of the three schools in the same league was overdue.

“Change is good and I like the new league,” Canyon Athletic Director Dave Harris said Thursday. “Our travel time will be reduced and having Hart, Saugus and Canyon in the same league is a real plus.”

Still, at Wednesday’s meeting at Saugus, athletic directors were less enamored of the scheduling problems incurred by membership in a five-team league. The officials discussed the prospect of three rounds of play instead of two for baseball and basketball.

Football is more problematic, however. Membership in an odd-number league calls for a bye week in the league season, forcing a scramble to fill open dates. The search is limited to other odd-numbered leagues, a minority in the Southern Section.

Negotiations have begun with the newly aligned Mission Valley League that consists of Arroyo, Duarte, El Monte, Mountain View and Rosemead.

If those leagues reach agreement, they will match teams in the bye weeks. However, schools at the Division V level are balking at the prospect of playing higher-level teams, particularly Canyon and Hart, powers at the Division I and Division III levels.

The bye week problem aside, other objections have been raised, particularly by Canyon football Coach Harry Welch.

“I hate a five-team league,” he said. “How do you justify taking three teams to the playoffs from a five-team league? I like eight-team leagues.”

In addition, Canyon must fill nonleague slots in its schedule previously inhabited by Hart and Burbank, which will become league games next fall. Both Hart and Canyon have four holes in their 1992 schedules.

The union of Canyon and Hart in the same league increases the stakes of that game, but at a price, Welch said. The Hart-Canyon game no longer will serve as the unofficial kickoff to the region’s high school football season. Traditionally, the Hart-Canyon game draws the biggest crowd of any game in the area.

“I don’t approach the Hart game as a do-or-die situation,” Welch said. “Our perspective had been that it’s a nonleague game but not more important than that. That’s going to change, but now the football season will just kind of start without that game. College has a kickoff classic, and this game was kind of like that for high school.”

Mike Herrington, Welch’s counterpart at Hart, also laments the loss of the Hart-Canyon season-opening slot, but unlike Welch he objects to playing Canyon in the last week of the season, citing recent Hart football history.

Traditionally, Hart gives a lackluster performance the week after the Canyon game.

“We get a lot of publicity with that game and it’s a great way to kick off the school year and the football season,” Herrington said.

“But we always have a letdown after that game. I don’t want to play them the last game of the season because we definitely don’t want a letdown in the first game of the playoffs.”