High School League Plan Fails Logic

There has been plenty of talk about realigning Orange County’s high schools, with plenty of meetings and plenty of proposals. There just haven’t been any results.

The Southern Section announced its proposed new leagues Monday, yet it can’t report any solutions. What it has is a patch slapped on a leaking tire. The folks in charge think it can get them through the next two years, while everyone privately hopes that enough schools will fall in line to create all-Catholic leagues, which is what the Angelus League was before it dissolved in 1992. Their best move forward is to revert to the past. This is progress?

The proposal puts Mater Dei in the Sunset League and Santa Margarita in the South Coast League beginning in the 1998-99 school year, but the latest addendum prohibits them from winning varsity league championships in football, baseball, softball and basketball, volleyball, soccer and water polo.

You know what they’ll discover when the plan comes up for review in two years? The private schools still will be private, the public schools still will be public and someone will need to find a way for schools with different enrollment guidelines to find a common ground to play on.

“Nothing has been settled,” Marina Principal Carol Osbrink said. “But I would rather do this than be in a league where we don’t want to be. I have faith in my peers [to find a solution in the future].”

Osbrink is one of the happy ones. She got her wish to stay in the Sunset League with schools closer to Marina, and she feels her teams can have a shot at league titles.

Those are the two issues at work: concerns about long game trips and competitive balance. The first is a legitimate response to increased travel times. The second is whining by the have-nots. Since when have sports been fair?

College teams have inherent recruiting advantages and disadvantages. Pro teams operate in different markets with different budgets. That’s what creates the underdogs we root for.

Now we’ve got teams competing for worthless championship banners. How can you consider yourself the best if you didn’t beat the best of the competition?

The parent of one Mater Dei student compared it to those elementary school races where every participant gets a ribbon.

“I think it’s a lot of ‘We want our ribbon too,’ ” she said. “If I am a coach of one of these high schools and they handed me a banner after Mater Dei beat us, it wouldn’t mean a thing.”

Really this is all about Mater Dei and, to a lesser extent, Santa Margarita. Nobody wants any part of them. It’s like an episode of “The Simpsons,” where Bart wins an elephant from a radio station, then finds out it’s hard to keep an elephant in your backyard and it’s even harder to get rid of it.

But Mater Dei isn’t going anywhere. So someone, somewhere had to deal with them. The public schools chose not to, at least not in any rational fashion. Their response was to close their eyes and pretend the elephant wasn’t there.

The schools have to compete with Mater Dei for Southern Section championships, so they might as well compete with the Monarchs for league championships. Why give up before the season even begins?

Let’s be honest: you play sports to win. In the process, you wind up having fun and even learning a few things. Now the rest of the Sunset League has disposed with a sense of competition, and what these athletes have learned from the school administrators is to back down when confronted with a challenge. There’s a good lesson for our future business executives, lawyers and doctors.

And this realignment hasn’t done a thing to resolve that same old nagging problem.

“I don’t think the issue of the parochial school is going to go away,” Osbrink said.

There’s a danger in this move-first-ask-questions-later mentality. Look at the mess the baseball owners got themselves into when they happily accepted those huge expansion fees before figuring out a sensible way to get Tampa Bay and Arizona into the big leagues.

Now they can’t agree on a realignment plan, they don’t have a schedule for 1998 and general managers head into the off-seasons without knowing whether their team will have a designated hitter. That’s what lack of foresight gets you.

The public schools wish the parochial schools would just go away and form their own leagues. That solves one problem, but it’s the lesser of the two evils. The parochial schools are spread throughout the county. When we weigh travel vs. competitive balance, is there really an issue? A better chance at a league championship shouldn’t matter at all if it will force other kids to leave school early and get home late because of long bus trips for league games.

How could the “educators” consider anything else when it comes to this conflict? As is often the case when sports and education clash, the classes apparently don’t matter at all.