CIF’s City Section Turns Athletics Job Over to Fiege : Prep sports: First female commissioner will be in charge of 49 high schools and about 30,000 athletes in ethnically diverse and often troubled district.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, second largest in the nation, will make history Monday when Barbara Fiege becomes the first woman to oversee its vast athletic program.

Fiege, 41, trained for the job by serving as athletic director at the district’s largest high school, Belmont, for the last seven years.

Although she spent years jockeying for the prestigious position, many wonder why the soft-spoken Fiege would want such ominous responsibility.

The district, hindered in recent years by severe budget cuts, has 49 high schools and some 30,000 athletes. The schools vary greatly in size and location, stretching from northern San Fernando Valley to San Pedro. It is also one of the most racially mixed districts in the nation.

“A lot of people ask me if I’m crazy for wanting this job,” said Fiege, who has been involved in athletics as a player and coach most of her life. “For me, this is a dream job. It’s a continuation of a lifelong goal. I hope I can retire in this position.”

She replaces Hal Harkness and will become only the fifth athletic commissioner of the district, which 60 years ago became known as the California Interscholastic Federation City Section. It is one of 10 such sections in the state governed by the CIF.

Although the City Section has a storied past, with dozens of its athletes going on to Olympic fame and thriving in professional sports, it has been steeped in negative publicity in recent years.

In addition to the district’s well-publicized budget cuts, many high-profile coaches have retired or quit and several athletic contests have been halted because of violence. Two years ago, the Wilmington Banning football team forfeited a football game against archrival Dorsey because Banning’s coach feared gang gunfire at Dorsey’s venue. The story received national media attention.

Added to a lengthy list of problems, Fiege might face additional resistance as the section’s first female commissioner.

“If she doesn’t receive proper support from key people, Barbara will have a difficult transition,” said Anne Heinline, commissioner of the San Francisco City Section since 1983 and the first female commissioner in the CIF. “A lot of coaches and administrators are used to dealing with men. She’s bound to come upon some structures that are rigid and difficult to deal with.”

Fiege said she is not worried about being the district’s first female commissioner.

“I knew if they based the decision on qualifications that I would have a good shot,” she said. “Being a woman should not affect how I do the job, but I can understand that it is important from an historical perspective.”

Fiege is the third female commissioner in the CIF. Nancy Lazenby Blaser is commissioner of the Central Coast Section, which extends from San Jose to just north of San Luis Obispo.

It appears that after decades of City Section leadership being referred to as the “old boys’ network,” district officials were ready for a change.

When Harkness, 55, announced his surprise resignation last April, 14 people applied for his job. Officials interviewed eight and a panel recommended five finalists to former senior high superintendent Dan Isaacs. Two were women.

A source close to the situation said Fiege and Myra Fullerton, athletic director at Franklin, were at the top of the list.

Whether Fiege encounters problems from male coaches remains to be seen. Heinline said some football coaches were uncooperative in the beginning but came around over the years when they saw she followed the rules.

“A lot of our coaches had their own way of doing things, and the previous commissioners often went along with them,” Heinline said. “I made a lot of teams forfeit games my first year (for breaking rules), and I don’t have many problems with coaches anymore.”

Dick Browning, who recently replaced Isaacs and oversaw the interview process, said the district did not specifically seek a woman for the job; he said it wanted someone who could run a busy office with the help of only two secretaries.

“Not all of our candidates were as capable of that as Barbara,” he said.

Fiege, a star volleyball and softball player at Northern Illinois University in the mid-1970s, has proven she is well-versed in many aspects of athletics.

After graduating from college, she moved to Los Angeles and began teaching physical education and coaching at Dorsey High in 1975. She transferred to Belmont in 1981, where she coached volleyball and basketball, annually fielding some of the top teams in her conference.

In 1986, Fiege decided to pursue a more administrative career and added athletic director duties to her busy schedule.

At Belmont, she oversaw an athletic program at a school with 4,300 students, the largest enrollment in the state and one of the largest in the country. Making the job more difficult, Belmont is one of the most racially diverse schools in the district with 27 languages spoken. As many as half of the students are foreign-born and arrive on campus only a short time after arriving in the United States.

Fiege is well known in the district. She was a longtime member of the Interscholastic Athletic Committee, which governs the City Section, and was also the section’s volleyball coordinator. She founded Coaches of Los Angeles Women’s Sports in 1985 and served as the commissioner of the district’s Sex Equity Commission for the last five years.

“Athletics has and will continue to be a big part of my life,” Fiege said. “I’ve thought about being a section commissioner before, and when the opportunity arose last spring, I knew it was something I wanted. I like the administrative role.”

Although she says much of her past has been spent fighting for women in sports, Fiege does not plan to make that issue her top priority. While her job description calls for her to coordinate and schedule sports competition, interpret and revise the rule book and settle any disputes that surface, the new commissioner realizes that one of her main tasks is to change the section’s tarnished image.

“I am aware the City doesn’t have a great reputation,” Fiege said. “Some of it is justified and some of it isn’t. This is one of the most complex districts in the nation, and it has a unique set of problems. I need to tackle those problems and improve public perception.”

In a recent round-table session with several Times’ sports reporters, Fiege outlined some of her immediate goals. Aside from building a positive relationship with reporters, she plans to form committees in each sport to help govern and organize playoff bracketing. She wants schools to be more self-governing to take pressure off the commissioner, and she plans to crack down on the growing problem of illegal transferring by toughening eligibility forms.

Fiege said she realizes many rules are being broken and that parents, coaches and administrators often look the other way. She said she will not hesitate to deal harsh punishments to those who violate rules.

“There is no room out there for people who knowingly cheat,” she said. “I won’t tolerate it, and I won’t be shy to levy tough punishments. I think it has to be that way.”

Browning praised the new commissioner as an extremely organized and diligent leader. Co-workers shared similar views.

“I keep telling Barbara she is too nice to be the City commissioner,” said Bob Levy, Belmont’s football coach. “I hope she doesn’t lose that quality.”