The top five teams in the Register’s Orange County media football poll top 10 are private school teams from the Trinity League.
Teams ranked 6-10 are public school teams.
Those top five did not play the 6-10 teams during the nonleague portion of the football season. They won’t play them in the playoffs, either. Trinity League teams are in the Pac-5 Division for playoffs, the only county teams in that division.
This scheduling separation of the top five teams in the county rankings and the other five is by design, not by coincidence.
“A lot of that’s by choice,” Matt Poston, coach of county No. 7 Tesoro said this week. “Private schools have a different way of doing things and they have open boundaries. There’s a reason the top five teams in Orange County are private schools.”
Tesoro played Santa Margarita of the Trinity League in nonleague games before the series was curtailed a couple of seasons ago. That “Rumble at the Ranch” rivalry might come back or it might not.
“We had a murderous schedule this year already,” Poston said. “Playing Santa Margarita would add another extremely competitive game.”
Edison, which was in the county top 10 earlier this season and might get back in it over the next two weeks, played Mater Dei and Servite in September, as it has for years. Those games were Edison’s only losses this season going into Friday’s schedule.
The county’s Trinity League schools have an advantage over their public school counterparts – the “reason,” as Poston put it, that Trinity League teams occupy positions 1-5 in the county poll.
There is the no-attendance-boundary advantage, although many of the county’s top public school programs have had top athletes from outside of their attendance program thanks to their magnet programs like a foreign language or an agriculture class offered nowhere else nearby.
Public schools have restrictions on how much of a stipend they can pay assistant coaches. Private schools can outbid public schools, and each other, for assistants.
Also, no public school is going to have the type of training facilities available at Orange Lutheran or Santa Margarita.
But public school football programs already have what they’ve wanted: They no longer are in the same playoff division as the Trinity League teams. So public school coaches can no longer use the excuse that the reason they won’t schedule Trinity League schools for nonleague games is because they don’t want to see a team they might face in the playoffs.
Public school coaches also can’t fret much about what a nonleague loss does to their playoff chances since teams no longer have to be .500 or better overall to qualify for a wild-card playoff berth, also known as an “at-large” berth.
And it’s hard to buy public schools’ frequent argument that playing a Trinity League team will reveal to the public school kids what’s going on in Trinity League athletics. Every athletically inclined eighth-grader and his or her parents already know all about what JSerra football is doing this year or what Mater Dei basketball does every year.
Play the Trinity League teams in September, you public school folks. It’s good for your team, because you get better when playing better competition. It’s good for your finances, because Trinity League school students and supporters buy plenty of game tickets and give your concession stands substantial and much-needed income.
Better yet, it’s good for Orange County football.
Taking a look around Orange County high school sports:
• The playoff schedule for 11-man football: first round, Nov. 14; second round, Nov. 21; semifinals Nov. 28; championship games Dec. 5 and 6.
• The CIF-Southern Section West Valley and Pac-5 division football championship games will be played at Angel Stadium on Dec. 6. The West Valley Division has the South Coast and Sunset leagues in it. Other division final dates and sites will be announced Dec. 1.
• Playoff brackets for girls team tennis will be released by the CIF-SS office Monday at 11 a.m. Playoff brackets for girls volleyball will be released next Friday, boys water polo on Nov. 9.
• Water polo championship games are Nov. 22 at Woollett Aquatics Center in Irvine. For many years, water polo finals and CIF-SS swimming and diving championships were at Belmont Plaza in Long Beach. That facility is closed. Demolition will start later this year.
• CIF-SS cross country championships start with prelims on Nov. 15 at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut. Finals are at Mt. SAC on Nov. 22. The state championship meet is Nov. 29 at Woodward Park in Fresno.
• It’s a rule: No outside competition in a sport during the season of sport. So some county girls volleyball players who played in a fundraising 4-on-4 sand volleyball tournament in October violated the rule. When they later played for their school teams they were ineligible to play in those games and their teams had to forfeit those games when their schools learned of the violations.
• Maybe it’s a bad rule, banning organized sand volleyball play during the indoor volleyball season. CIF-SS member schools created the rule and only they can change it. Until then, they must abide by it.
Contact the writer: sfryer@ocregister.com
