Alexander: A conversation with CIF Southern Section commissioner Mike West

LOS ALAMITOS — The corner office, toward the back of the CIF Southern Section building here, hasn’t changed much. Plaques, framed jerseys and other memorabilia decorate the walls, with the round conference table on one side of the room and the big desk – from where the athletic interests of more than 560 high schools spanning six counties are governed – on the other.

We’ve been coming here annually since 2017, when Southern Section assistant commissioner Thom Simmons invited local media members to sit-down interviews with then-commissioner Rob Wigod. Even in 2020, when nobody was doing on-site interviews with anybody thanks to COVID-19, Wigod held a virtual news conference in July to discuss pushing the high school sports seasons back to the winter and spring quarters.

(That was, incidentally, quite the success given the circumstances: They played everything – a full school year’s worth of sports in five months, including a shortened football schedule in the spring – and made it to mid-June, putting on more than 2,000 playoff games and crowning more than 100 divisional champions.)

Now Mike West is in charge, beginning his second year overseeing the section. And while I’m not sure how many others request interview time, it’s become a nice and needed ritual. There are thousands of young athletes representing these schools on the fields and courts of play, and while methods and concerns might change, getting the commissioner’s thoughts directly is never a bad thing.

West ascended from the principal’s office at Riverside’s Martin Luther King High School to the big chair last summer after having been a member and former president of the Southern Section executive committee. He was acquainted with the pertinent issues through that executive committee role, but the day-to-day work represented a different beast, and that first year in charge was itself an education.

“It was great to be able to go through everything for a year, experience it,” he said in our session last week. “Learned a lot about the office, learned a lot about the position and just the rhythms of it if nothing else, along with the duties and things of that nature. So I’m definitely much more comfortable, a little bit more confident.”

The biggest adjustment to come? Beginning this fall, the CIF’s other team sports will follow the lead of football and go to the competitive equity playoff system, with postseason divisions based solely on the current season’s results and resulting power rankings, and coaches responsible for reporting their game-to-game results. It seems to have worked well in football – the proof, West said, being that some schools that hadn’t previously had postseason success have won championships.

Still, I can see coaches from other sports on a campus dropping in on the football coach at some point to ask how this works, specifically how to draw up an advantageous nonleague schedule and how to point toward a postseason without knowing for sure who might be in your division until the last minute.

True, West said, but he said that adjustment pales in comparison to the days when you might have gone into a first-round playoff matchup feeling like you were being fed to the lions.

“You’re going to be relatively assured that you’re going to be in a division with other teams, based upon that year’s data, that you’re competitive with,” he said. “Whether you’re No. 36 or No. 1 in that division, you’re at least going to have a shot to win your opening-round game as opposed to in some instances (to) know going in you have no chance.”

Simmons noted that while the initial adjustment to the situation in football three years ago created some consternation – much of it, I suspect, from fans who examined brackets with furrowed brows – it didn’t take long for schools and coaches to get used to the system.

“It’s kind of like what we say when we go to a new venue and we’re working with a new event team,” Simmons said. “Everything is no, no, no and hell no. Nothing but questions and nothing but worry. And then by halftime of a football game: ‘Here’s the keys to the place. Lock up when you’re done.’ Because they trust us at that point.”

One advantage of the new system, as we’ve seen in football, is that the divide between public and private schools – or, more specifically, the haves and the have-nots – is less of an issue.

“If you’re a have, you’re not in a division with the have-nots, OK?” West said. “That’s where we start running into issues of, ‘Well, they have this advantage and (we) don’t,’ and so on and so forth.”

A yearly issue with high school athletics is recruitment and retention of game officials, especially in the wake of the pandemic. The Southern Section faced a different issue last year when soccer officials staged a boycott over wages and leagues had to scramble to find replacements.

In football, West said, the number of officials has increased enough that in a number of geographic areas, teams won’t have to move games from Friday to Thursday in order to staff every game. But the big issue isn’t recruitment but retention, and a lot of the issue there is the treatment officials receive from coaches and, particularly, fans.

“If they stay for at least three years, data shows that we’ve got them, that they’ll remain,” West said. “It’s getting them to that three-year point.”

Institutional guidance can help regulate coach behavior. Abuse from spectators is a touchier subject, especially if parents who are rough on officials in club or off-campus sports carry that same behavior over to the high school level.

West said individual schools’ administrators are being advised to talk to those overly boisterous fans, to “go over and actually have a conversation as opposed to having to address it more vehemently.” The thinking is that an earlier conversation can be a reminder and can defuse situations.

The alternative: The CIF rulebook states that if a referee has to eject a fan, it’s an automatic one-game ban for a first offense and a three- to six-game ban the second time. It doesn’t automatically apply when a school administrator asks a misbehaving fan to leave, but there is a template.

A year ago, West – whose roots were as an athletic trainer – talked about a concerted effort to get more athletic trainers on campuses. He said last week they’ve added resources for schools, including job descriptions and links to salary schedules, but the trick now is finding candidates.

“I think by and large, there’s a strong desire to do it,” he said. “But right now there’s really not a plethora of athletic trainers that are out there. … We’ve got to try to make sure that there are enough athletic trainers to provide support for the need in our area.”

And then there is maybe the biggest current success story in high school athletics, the growth of girls flag football. A year ago, West said, about 150 schools offered the sport. The current count is 264, a little less than half of all of the schools in the section, and some schools are adding junior varsity teams to the mix. And this is seven players a side, not the 5-on-5 version that’s being planned for Olympic competition in 2028 in L.A.

“It’s the most popular sport going on, and I only see it getting larger,” he said. “More and more schools each year will end up having it in some form or fashion.”

The best part? There will be playoffs this year, and section champions.

West said he was “not aware” of any other emerging sports that might reach varsity status, though he said there were occasional inquiries about ice hockey, which may have something to do with the fact that the Kings and Ducks both run high school leagues.

Then, West added: “We keep getting kidded that pickleball will end up being one of those (sports) at some point in time.”

Tennis coaches, you’ve been warned.

jalexander@scng.com