CIF Commissioner Rob Wigod says section refining competitive equity

With the next academic year poised to get underway soon, CIF Southern Section Commissioner Rob Wigod was as excited as a student on the first day of school on Thursday as he shared his thoughts on the state of high school sports.

Hope will spring eternal, especially toward the goal of having full regular seasons and playoffs. The coronavirus pandemic benched high school sports for nearly a calendar year. Cross-country, which started up first and had a 52-day regular season, returned in early February.

The goal for many during the resumption of high school sports was to provide opportunities for all athletes to compete. The section playoffs were removed from the equation to allow for longer periods during which sports that fell into ‘Season 1’ in the revised CIF sports calendar could be played.

When ‘Season 2’ arrived, it was pandemonium due to the sheer volume of sports being played at once. The need to share facilities resulted in games being played in gyms and campus stadiums nearly nonstop.

“In four weeks, we had 19 sports and 106 championships between May 21 and June 19, but our schools did a tremendous job … of managing all that needed to be done with them,” Wigod said. “I think our team here was just phenomenal in terms of all the work that we had to do from our perspective to manage [and run] those championships.

“What a feeling it was by the time that we got to June 19, which was our last baseball championship game. It was a tremendous sense of accomplishment for what was done.”

A new season brings anticipation of what lies ahead. To that end, the section will be debuting a playoff system in football that will be decided entirely by power rankings stemming from the current regular season.

The competitive equity model that the CIF has utilized in recent years has relied on data from the previous two seasons to place teams in divisions.

Wigod said the section will divide the total number of automatic playoff berths due to its leagues by 14, and the automatic qualifiers will be placed into their respective divisions from there. The remaining spots in the 16-team playoff brackets will be filled in by teams that receive at-large bids.

“This new system, … I think a big selling point to our schools when they voted for it, was that they knew that every guaranteed entry would make it, and that there would still be a reasonable number of at-large teams who deserve to make it, too,” Wigod said.

An Open Division will also be introduced for boys’ and girls’ water polo in the section, something that has already come into play with several other sports such as basketball, tennis and volleyball.

Wigod said that adding such a division is a step forward, as it allows the current season to be evaluated and hold a championship featuring the best teams of that year.

“Football is sort of the test case for everybody, using only current regular season,” Wigod said. “These other sports are taking that initial step by identifying the best teams from the current regular season and putting them into a [separate] division. It’s not so much an open division. It’s just saying that we’re going to identify this top division with our best teams from this year.”

This year will also mark the first for girls’ beach volleyball as a CIF-sanctioned sport. If there is participation in the sport from 20% of the section’s member schools this spring, there could be playoffs the following season.

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