The days of the Central Coast’s traditional prep sports leagues—the Los Padres League (LPL) and PAC-8—are numbered, as are many high schools’ long and notorious bus rides to far-flung areas of Southern California.
Come next fall, 13 of the region’s 16 high schools will jump ship from the CIF Southern Section and begin competing in the new “Ocean” and “Mountain” leagues under the Central Section, which encompasses the Central Valley and Central Coast.
The organizational shakeup is the fruit of more than two years of coordination and collaboration between local athletic directors who had grown frustrated by the current structure—the long travel times for playoff games; the wild competitive disparity in the LPL and PAC-8; and a lack of overall flexibility afforded by playing under the sprawling Southern Section, which stretches from San Luis Obispo to San Diego.
“This is an experimental vision for us,” said Greg Lanthier, athletic director and basketball coach at Pioneer Valley High School. “[The Southern Section] is too big to govern. We felt getting into a smaller section would be more beneficial for us. We align much closer both demographically and competitively with the Central Section, and the travel has been a frustrating experience with the Southern Section.”
In the new setup, the Mountain League will serve as the more competitive division, while the Ocean League will be home to lower-tiered teams. Who plays in which league will depend on each sport and the participating high schools. For instance, if a school has a historically successful football program, the team would be placed in the Mountain League. But if that same school has a relatively weak basketball program, the basketball team would play in the Ocean League.
Lanthier said dividing the schools into the leagues has been one of the trickier aspects of the transition.
“There’s such diversity in the Central Coast,” he said. “It’s hard to put schools into leagues because there’s so much disparity in some of the sports.”
While a difficult task, rearranging the teams was one of the most important reasons for leaving the Southern Section in the first place, Lanthier said. The current makeup of the leagues is too polarized, he said. For several sports, there are a few teams that perennially dominate, while other teams struggle to even compete.
“There’s no benefit to anybody in that,” Lanthier said. “You’re watching teams in some sports where in four years, they don’t win any league games.”
The schools moving—Pioneer Valley, Righetti, St. Joseph, Santa Maria, Orcutt Academy, Paso Robles, Templeton, Atascadero, SLO, Arroyo Grande, Mission Prep, Morro Bay, and Nipomo—are close to finalizing the league rules and bylaws (their next meeting is Nov. 15), which will likely lead to some substantial changes to how some sports are played.
Since the athletic directors want both the Mountain and Ocean leagues to operate under the same rules, that means creating a system that will work for everyone. In essence, Lanthier said the rules will orient toward the needs of the “majority” of student-athletes—“where in the past, most the decisions were made for the upper high end” of athletes.
Changes to accommodate both leagues and all schools include shifting from 18-hole to 9-hole competition in golf and scaling back the baseball schedule to two games per week instead of three, since some schools don’t have enough pitchers to play three.
“Some coaches are not happy about that,” Lanthier said.
Declining to join the new leagues and the Central Section are three fixtures to the local prep sports scene: Lompoc, Cabrillo, and Santa Ynez high schools. Those schools weren’t feeling the same urgency as the other 13 for changing sections.
“We didn’t ever see a reason to leave the Southern Section,” said Cris Avery, athletic director at Santa Ynez High School. “We were in a situation that we thought was working in most regards.”
According to Lanthier, the departing schools’ original idea was to stay in the Southern Section, but to form new leagues that would enable schools to shuffle around between them.
“Those three schools in the south kept blocking that,” Lanthier said.
Next fall, Santa Ynez, Lompoc, and Cabrillo will join a league with Santa Barbara, Dos Pueblos, and San Marcos high schools.
Sports contributor Peter Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2017.