Releaguing Proposal Hits a Roadblock

El Segundo and the four Torrance high schools won an 11th-hour reprieve Thursday when the Southern Section Council voted to uphold their appeal to overturn the Coast Area’s releaguing proposal.

The Council’s action means that the 16 Coast Area schools currently grouped in the Bay, Ocean and Pioneer leagues must rework a releaguing proposal that was approved by a majority of area schools last spring.

Under the proposal, the Pioneer League was to be eliminated and its six schools--El Segundo, West, North, South, Torrance and Centennial--placed in expanded eight-team Bay and Ocean leagues for a four-year cycle beginning in the fall of 1994.

That decision was a disappointment for administrators from El Segundo and the four Torrance schools, who argued that the proposal would place their schools in inequitable situations with regard to comparative enrollment and competitive parity, two of the three criteria recommended by the Southern Section for releaguing. Distance between schools is the third.

El Segundo argued that its placement in the Ocean League with larger schools such as Santa Monica would have been unfair, particularly for its football program. Santa Monica has an enrollment of 2,800 students. El Segundo has 675 students.

The disparity in those enrollments influenced the vote of the Southern Section Council.

No alternative proposal was made at Thursday’s hearing, but El Segundo Athletic Director John Stevenson said it should not be difficult to come up with a more equitable plan.

“I’m really confident that we’ll come up with something that most schools will be relatively happy with,” Stevenson said. “I think there are solutions.”

Representatives of the Coast Area schools are expected to meet before Thanksgiving. The meeting reportedly will include the six Moore League schools, which were excluded from the last Coast Area vote in May.

Under the rejected plan, El Segundo and Centennial would have moved from the Pioneer League to the Ocean League to join holdovers Morningside, Redondo, Mira Costa, Culver City and Beverly Hills and Santa Monica from the Bay League.

South, West, North and Torrance--whose enrollments range from 1,800 to 1,350--would have been grouped with Peninsula, Leuzinger, Hawthorne and Inglewood in the Bay League. The latter four schools have enrollments ranging from 3,100 for Peninsula to 1,900 for Inglewood.

Bay and Ocean schools favored going to eight-team leagues because, in their current five-team alignments, the leagues must cross-match their teams every week during the league season to fill our their schedules. This led to problems not experienced by the six-team Pioneer League, administrators said.