Opinion: League Reformation


 The league complexion of the Westside and South Bay public schools is relentlessly changing. Looking back even 5 years ago, the three leagues made up of these aforementioned schools were completely different. The Bay League is the oldest of the three leagues, having a history lasting longer than 100 years! As a pillar of sports in the area, the Bay has had a fair share of core members as Mira Costa (Manhattan Beach), Redondo Union, Palos Verdes Peninsula, and Palos Verdes have all been members of the league for more than twenty years. The league has had a rotating group of South Bay and Westside Schools in it for years, and right now Santa Monica and Culver City round out the league. For the Pioneer, all schools in the Torrance school district (North, South, West, and Torrance) are in the league alongside Lawndale and El Segundo. In the Ocean league, Inglewood unified schools Morningside and Inglewood are in the league, alongside them two of the three Centinela Valley Unified schools (Leuzinger and Hawthorne) are in the Ocean as well. The league also has Compton Centennial and Beverly Hills Highschool's competing in it. The South Bay Athletic Association (SBAA) holds other leagues including the Moore league but it seems those leagues are separated from those that are northwest of San Pedro. 

The separation of divisions is an invigorating process as the school leaders have to factor in long time rivalries, while also trying to maximize the automatic playoff bids that the eighteen teams can obtain. It’s a known fact that the Torrance schools would like to remain together, in addition to the Bay leagues core four. The conversation in the realignment meeting generally gets very heated as there’s not many options on how to split up the leagues. The capabilities to make everyone happy is impossible in these meetings as competitive fairness is a contentious point as well. 

In football, the Ocean league is a joke as last season the league had a range of team play comparable to Alabama vs a Community College. Beverly Hills and Compton Centennial flat out cannot compete against a goliath of a team like Inglewood. Beverly wouldn’t be able to compete in many pop warner leagues, nonetheless competing with Inglewood who nearly won the division one championship. Due to this deplorable competitive standard, the South Bay Athletic Association (SBAA) committee decided to have leagues dedicated to only football, and the leagues will be sorted by performance of each team in the last couple of years. While I think it’s a splendid idea, I have three key additions to the plan that would be vital to maximize playoff opportunities, reinvigorate rivalries and to keep competitive fairness intact. 

(Here is a Rough Representation of the 18 Schools Involved on a Map)


Firstly, I think it’s vital to maximize playoff opportunities. The more teams the area sends to the dance the better, and the best way to do that is to make four leagues. In leagues with five teams in the Southern Section, three of the five get automatic bids to the playoffs. For the top two leagues, it’d be of the utmost importance to have 60% of the teams make the playoffs as having this would maximize West Los Angeles footprint in football’s toughest divisions. This is why expanding to four leagues would be of the South Bay’s best interest, having the two top leagues in the area have five teams, and the final two leagues have four teams in them respectively.

Here would be the format:

I’ve put an aggregate score (Based off of MaxPreps.com rankings from years 2020, 2021, and 2022 and divided by three for the average) of all the schools in question in the last three years (Post-Covid and realignment) to put them in the divisions. In addition to that, head to head was favored for all schools who played each other that were within a ten aggregate ranking score. After this season, you would add the 2023 standings, and then make the split for the teams in the plans inaugural 2024 season.


Bay Division I

  1. Inglewood (Ocean): 32 Average Rank. Inglewood has been the cream of the crop for the last three years in the South Bay. Going perfect in league has boosted them as well, despite playing competition of teams in the 1000s.

  2. Palos Verdes (Bay): 98 Average Rank. Palos Verdes after losing one game in league in 2021 to Culver City have come back with a vengeance, winning ten straight league games over two years culminating with two straight bay league titles. Their bay league supremacy is well documented and shows the importance of competitive equity.

  3. Lawndale (Pioneer): 130 Average Rank. Lawndale has been the premier squad in the Pioneer league since joining in 2020, it would be great to see them and old Ocean league rival Culver City duke it out in an old Ocean league rivalry.

  4. Culver City (Bay): 135 Average Rank. After a couple outstanding seasons pre covid, the Centaurs haven’t digressed much but a loss to Costa last year surprised many around the Bay.

  5. Mira Costa (Bay): 159 Average Rank. Mira Costa was firmly the two in the bay league for years until Culver City joined the league, despite that fate the Mustangs finished second last season, with a good year in 2023 they will cement their spot in the inaugural year of the top division in the area. 


Bay Division II

  1. (6 Overall) Leuzinger (Ocean): 205 Average Rank. The Olympians were terrible in the Covid year for their standards but Leuzinger has ranked third the last two years in this ranking. With a good year in 2023, they could steal a top division spot off of Mira Costa.

  2. (7 Overall) North (Pioneer): 239 Average Rank. North has been getting better and better, almost winning the Pioneer last year after barely falling short to Lawndale. Even if they were put in this division, if they continue with their hard nosed brand of football, North might be the first team to join the Bay League.

  3. (8 Overall) Redondo (Bay): 360 Average Rank. Redondo Union at a certain point nearly ten years ago were fighting for league titles. Since, they’ve been fighting to be the top of the bottom three in the division, but last season they finished with a 7-3 record (2-3 League) pushing them into the playoffs.

  4. (9 Overall) Peninsula (Bay): 378 Average Rank. Peninsula of Palos Verdes have waned for a playoff appearance for the last two years as the school has come one game off of having a shot to compete in the playoffs. If there is a team that could use a more favorable league it’d be them.

  5. (10 Overall) West (Pioneer): 419 Average Rank. West has become the third team in the Pioneer this season yet the league is always in disarray as close matches define the Pioneer compared to the other two leagues.

Bay Division III

  1. (11 Overall) South (Pioneer): 421 Average Rank. South is the first team in the third division, they compete year in year out with West as shown by their rankings being only two points from each other.

  2. (12 Overall) Torrance (Pioneer): 470 Average Rank. Despite having a bad year last year overall have had better finishes in the past. This season is key to keep them in this league.

  3. (13 Overall) Santa Monica (Bay):576 Average Rank. Santa Monica’s first two years weights them down heavily, and due to this they are in the middle of the third division despite finishing above Torrance in last year's rankings. 

  4. (14 Overall) El Segundo (Pioneer):633 Average Rank. El Segundo in the past have been a lot better but recently, it’s been dull for the Eagles winning no league games despite coming close.

Bay Division IV

  1. (15 Overall) Hawthorne (Ocean):863 Average Rank. Hawthorne have never been a perennial powerhouse yet due to league alignment nowadays they have the ability to make the playoffs.

  2. (16 Overall) Morningside (Ocean):885 Average Rank. Same goes for the Monarchs as the Inglewood school just has to finish 3rd in the lowly division. 

  3. (17 Overall) Centennial (Ocean):936 Average Rank. Centennial actually beat Morningside last season but a ten point loss to Hawthorne held them out of the playoffs.

  4. (18 Overall) Beverly Hills (Ocean): 1024 Average Rank. Finally, we have Beverly, a far cry from the Paysinger led squad in the 2000s.


Now playoff opportunities for the south bay association would expand to 10 of 18 automatics. With that there would also be non-automatic qualifiers, which could range between 2-5 depending on the year. An increase in the competitive playing field, I would assume the CIFSS committee would choose to give non-automatic qualifiers from the area a heightened opportunity to make the playoffs as their schedules would be very competitive. This obvious expansion in postseason play would be vital to the continual long lasting success for the schools.

Rivalries are of the utmost importance. All the way down from the battle of the hill in Palos Verdes to the donkey game on the Westside, rowdy rivalries drive school spirit. With this league reformation, we would lose classic rivalries that are year in year out staples of the south bay. Due to this expansion of leagues, there’s an opportunity for a week 10 rivalry week. If we move up the league schedule up by a week, we can get a rivalry game every year for teams who wouldn’t play each other in a remodeling. Each year, after the league reformats, if a rivalry is played in regular league play, you’d play your next most important matchup. So as of this league reformatting, here would be the matchups:
Santa Monica vs Culver City

Palos Verdes vs Palos Verdes Peninsula

Redondo Union vs Mira Costa

Torrance vs North

Lawndale vs El Segundo

Morningside vs Inglewood

Leuzinger vs Hawthorne

West vs South

Compton Centennial vs Beverly Hills

I know Beverly plays Centennial in league but they both could use additional matchups against each other. Maybe both schools could play each other on the last week and reschedule their earlier matchup to face an out of league opponent.


Now to my final point, promotion and relegation. Due to this reformatting, I think it’d be an immense idea to bring promotion and relegation into these newfound four leagues. With promotion and relegation, a team would be rewarded with a higher level of competition if they win their league while a team who has lost their season already still has something to play for by the final league matchup. The idea would go like this, if you were in the Bay League's second division and you won it, you would be rewarded with the ability to be in the first division. Now if you lost all four games in the first division, you would be demoted to the second division. This would also eliminate teams intentionally losing games in league to be in a lower playoff division.


Someone brought up a contentious point to me about my idea, if a team was extremely young and they lost every game and the next year they bounced back and demolished the lesser competition, what was the point of reformatting in this way? While it is a good point, I think re-divisioning every four years or every two years is way worse. A High school can turn around in a heartbeat, and a great example of that is the Inglewood turnaround in 2018 to 2019. Inglewood was 0-10 in 2018, and would’ve been in the equivalent of the fourth division. In 2019 however with a new coach, Inglewood spontaneously went 10-0 and killed the entire Pioneer league. They ended up in the division 11 playoffs as the Southern Section at the time did not do reseeding, and they demolished their first and second round competition. Leagues reformatted the next year but if the Pioneer league stayed the same, Inglewood would’ve killed every single one of those teams for years. This is why it’s important to have the ability to go up in leagues year by year as having four years of a league will create competitive imbalances we’re trying to avoid. You can see how the CIFSS has had improved results after changing how they create playoff divisions as the amount of blowouts has continually diminished after the reseeding process. The development of rivalries in the new leagues will be incomparable to before so the relief would have to be an end of season rivalry week as I stated before. In addition to that, team trend lines are very important, as Santa Monica, who is in division three in the hypothesis, beat West Torrance (Division II) by 19 last week. So having this ability to go up and down would allow the Vikings to compete in a harder, more challenging division.

In conclusion, I thoroughly agree with the decision of the leaders of the area's high school sports leagues. I think football should be a sport with competitive fairness as a team with less than twenty kids should not be playing a behemoth with division one commits around the field. While important however I think a check and balance system of promotion and relegation will continue this competitive fairness. Also maintaining rival matchups is what Friday Night Lights is all about, so the week 10 game is vital.


The Consensus as of right now is that the leagues will not do promotion and relegation, and they will maintain three leagues, which is still fine. For the other sports, a reformation will likely lead to Beverly Hills reuniting Culver City and Santa Monica, reuniting the Westside three. I think the maximization of playoff opportunities and competitive games in all sports would actually be a splendid idea but travel costs for schools and players and at home time would be limited for the student-athletes, diminishing at school performance. Nonetheless, I throughly agree with the South Bay Athletic Association's plan, and hope to see it come to fruition in the future.


Written by Theo Dowling President and Editor and Chief of the SamoSportsBlog

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