LOS ALAMITOS — This tradition started with an invitation. In August of 2017, media members throughout Southern California were invited to reserve a time for a one-on-one interview with the California Interscholastic Federation’s then-commissioner, Rob Wigod.
I accepted, as did a number of others, and – given the hot high school sports story at the time – my first question involved the Ball family from Chino Hills, and particularly the development that LaMelo Ball, then about to begin his junior year in high school, already had a signature sneaker (at $395 a pop, no less). “This is sort of uncharted territory,” Wigod said, but added that at that point it wasn’t illegal as long as Ball wasn’t wearing any Chino Hills gear without promoting it.
The interview was fun, the column worked out well, and as the invitations came in succeeding years I continued to schedule the trek to Los Alamitos. Now it is indeed tradition, every August: I make the request for an hour of the commissioner’s time, assistant commissioner Thom Simmons sets it up, and every August I show up at the CIF offices to get a read on the pulse of prep sports, first from Wigod and more recently from his successor, Mike West.
And since the column, with its limits on how much space I can fill in the printed newspaper, can only go so far, here are some additional excerpts from this year’s session.
More on participation figures
The numbers showing a 1.6% increase in student participation in sports throughout California was countered with a 4% decrease in 11-man football participation, but there was another curious statistic that West offered.
“I’m actually kind of intrigued because general enrollment at schools has been down, and it’s continuing to decline,” he said, noting that the increase in athletic participation is still “very encouraging.”
I asked him if he thought that overall decline was the result of people moving elsewhere or if there were other factors involved:
“I can’t state specifically about what I know about people leaving California,” he said. “I think some of the data does show that young families aren’t having as many kids and young individuals are choosing not to have kids at all at times. … The traditional trend is, I think you wanted to have between two and four kids, you know, that was the goal. Now it’s maybe one or two, if any. … Communities sometimes start off young and then they grow old, and it’s hard, particularly with the economy now, for young families to buy into those areas now. And so it becomes an older community, fewer younger families with fewer kids in those communities.
“…We get CBED (California Basic Educational Data), we get enrollment data from all the schools each and every year. So it’s something that we could collect by school. I don’t know if we get aggregated by district or by area or not. But that’s not data that we would be pulling for any investigatory reason other than just interest. We ask for that data so that we can actually put the divisions for cross country and track (together).”
Unified Sports
This is a method of competition in individual sports where a special education or special needs student is paired with a regular education student. I’m guessing it’s under the radar – I hadn’t heard of it until West brought it up – but it shouldn’t be.
“They work as a team throughout the season and then at the end they go through and participate in an event,” he said. “For instance, we have a track and field championship for Unified Sports and we also have Unified events in our swimming championships. And then this last year, we actually had a flag football tournament that we sponsored along with the Special Olympics of Southern California that allowed the teams to play.
“So what happens is in these events, if you’ve got an event like the 100 meters, you have the unified athlete and then the partner both run and their times are combined for what place they finish. So it’s what they both do at the same time. Same thing with swimming, that you’ve got the Unified athlete and then the partner, they swim the distance and then their times are combined and then they’re compared to the teams and partners from other schools in the same event. We’ve had a championship in track and field now for a few years and like I said for a couple of years now as well (in) swimming, we’ve had these events. So that’s been a very rewarding experience to have gone through an experience and hopefully allow for expansion.
“The premise behind it is more about inclusion and allowing the Unified athletes to (be) partnered up and included in, and they have this relationship throughout a season,” he added. “It’s not just putting them together to run a championship event. They’re going out to practices a couple of days a week. They’re bonding as partners, they have a relationship that goes throughout the entire season and so on.
“The competition piece is great, but it’s more about those relationships that are built and those types of things that are supposed to be happening in inclusion programs like that, that really is very heartwarming for me.”
Other emerging CIF sports?
“There’s no one sport that’s come to the top of the heap that says, OK, this is the one we’re going to have to look at,” he said. “We’ve had a number of potential sports come across the desk, such as boys flag football, boys beach volleyball, pickleball. Those have been the ones that I’ve heard of the most, but nothing has come to the head as far as, okay now we’re gonna start looking at this one. There may be a change in that the next few years, but for right now, I mean, we’re pretty saturated.”
In other words, there’s only so much field or gym space.
“The number of sports in the spring is a challenge,” he said. “You know, you got lacrosse fighting with track and field for venue space, and all those types of things. You’ve got so many sports in all the other seasons. … People complain that girls flag football’s in the fall and it fights against regular football, but if you put them in the spring they’d be fighting against everybody else for field time too.
“So, it’s like where do you put ’em? You know the gyms are being used. The pool might be being used. … I’m not suggesting that we won’t expand, but for right now, I think facilities-wise and just program-wise, those schools in particular that offer all the sports that we have to offer, they’re pretty tapped right now.”
Girls flag football
West called that emerging (emerged?) sport “a great example of how something can really just explode and blossom. And if there was something (else) like that that was really, we felt, maybe missing, you know, we would take a look at that, but we’re not sure what that might be, and it hasn’t come to the fore yet.”
Did he anticipate that girls flag football would take off the way it has?
“There was an anticipation that it definitely (would) be popular. To the extent that it has become what it is, I don’t know if anybody could have anticipated that. But no, I think we all felt that it was a winner and that it would begin to expand.”
The NIL effect
This question was passed along by the Orange County Register’s Steve Fryer: “Is the opportunity for NIL for athletes making the big-name schools even more attractive to student-athletes?”
West said he didn’t “have any data to support or refute that statement,” but added that the schools may not be involved in any sort of NIL deals, which goes back to that original question to Wigod nine years ago about LaMelo Ball’s shoes.
“The school uniform, the association with the school can’t be used,” West said. “Now, does it not mean that if I have someone that is a well-known person that happens to be at a prominent school, does that help bolster them? It might, but there can’t be a direct correlation between the two. In other words, the schools can’t be setting up a deal for that to take place.”
The example West thought of was former Corona Centennial guard Jared McCain, now a member of the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, who created a following on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok completely separate from his basketball persona.
“He was a social media phenom,” West recalled. “He was making all sorts of money on his NIL, but it was based on him and not being at the school, and not being on that basketball team. It might be because he was a basketball player, but not because he was on the basketball team. So as long as those things are separate, more power to anybody.”
Officiating
Not much has changed, as noted in the column. The issue is less about attracting officials but keeping them beyond two years, largely because of fan behavior.
“We have officials that are just learning their craft,” he said. “They may not be as well-seasoned, they might make a few mistakes along the way. And they’re officiating lower level games, where there’s probably a lot more fouls committed and those types of things, and parents and people in the stands are relatively unforgiving. … It’s chasing off some officials that, at this moment, may not be the best, but have a lot of promise. … If we can get them into their third year, they’re gonna stay for a while. But these officials are coming in and dropping out after year one or year two, and we’re just not able to keep them.”
Attracting and training game officials, to be honest, isn’t the job of the CIF office but of the various regional officials associations that assign them.
And, West said, “when it comes to helping them make it through, to me, I think it’s official to official. You know, ‘Hey, I went through this.’ (They) could tell the war stories and kind of give them the pats on the back and say, ‘Look, you know, this is just part of life. And as far as an official’s concerned, don’t take it personal, (let it roll) off your back and just continue to move forward because you’re doing a good job. We recognize you and we support you.’
“All these officials groups that we work with recognize where things are at. They all want to have more people coming in and sticking around. They do, by and large, a very good job of trying to support these officials in that way.”
One source of potential officials or umpires is players who might not go beyond the high school level but want to stay in the game.
“There’s opportunities for maybe having some classes on campus, some curriculum that’s been developed to try to provide avenues for officials training while you’re in high school and to try and grab them before they leave,” he said. “We’ve talked to some community colleges about that possibility as well, an officiating class that allows that to happen. So to be able to grab them right away is ideal. Hopefully they can get the bug early and then get in early and figure that out.”
jalexander@scng.com