Sac-Joaquin Section proposed realignment: SFL adds power; FVL, PVL stretch into Sacramento

The first Sac-Joaquin Section realignment meeting took place Tuesday afternoon in a banquet hall that saw standing-room only as administrators, coaches and athletic directors across the region came to offer their two cents on the first proposal. The last realignment was in 2018. Typically, the meetings take place every four years but the pandemic pushed the 2022 realignment to 2024. The next realignment will take place in 2028. Almost immediately upon the release of the first proposal, people began discussing the pros and cons of each league and its impact on various sports. It's important to note there is no perfect way to align the leagues in the state's second-biggest section in terms of schools. For the Sierra Foothill League, the rich appear to be getting richer as Delta League staples Jesuit, St. Francis and Davis are proposed to join in 2024. Davis and Jesuit sit as the top two schools in section championships across all programs with 157 and 130 and bring strong powers in the Olympic sports to an already-loaded league. St. Francis has an impressive collection of blue banners with 99. Jesuit football, basketball and baseball are always among the top teams in the area and have growing rivalries with Granite Bay, Del Oro and Folsom through several postseason run-ins. While Jesuit and Davis add strength to a league that is already considered the best in the region and possibly Northern California, it also adds travel, which not all coaches are a fan of. "I think the league should be more geographically based than they are, and that's not an indictment of this particular proposal. That's more just a statement about the philosophies of the CIF and the section," Granite Bay football coach Joe Cattolico said in an interview with the Auburn Journal. "The reason why I like that is you get one of the really neat things about high school sports. You get rivalries with kids who know each other, kids from the same communities or neighboring communities who grew up playing against each other in youth sports. Then you get them playing against each other in high school." While the SFL is loaded when looking at athletics from a bird's-eye view, it also has clear mismatches in specific sports, such as Davis football. "I think it was tricky with the competitive equity piece because it changes depending on the lens of which sport you're looking through," Cattolico said. "I think it's hard to draw a league up without saying, 'This school in this sport might not be a good fit for that league.' " "It's difficult and we're torn. We love the SFL. We've always been in the SFL. We love the competitive spirit that it brings, and we still feel like we can compete in the SFL," Del Oro Athletic Director Jill Butler said. "We were hoping that it was still going to be a six-team league and our goal was to have Rocklin, Whitney, Granite Bay and maybe a West Park and Woodcreek. We thought that would be beneficial because the teams would be more centralized. We would have bigger rivalries and the enrollment would be a little bit more similar than what it is right now." As it stands, Del Oro's enrollment is 1,656, currently the smallest in the league by nearly 400 students. Davis is the third-largest school in the section with 2,849 while Jesuit has 1,940. "Davis has nearly 3,000 students. That's the wide range," Butler says. "I don't have the knowledge on what our predicted enrollment is going to be. I know there might be some apartments being built and a housing development still in the works, but that's years down the road. So I don't see our our enrollment going up anytime soon." Moving Del Oro out of the SFL is challenging for multiple reasons. For starters, a school with the athletic success of Del Oro will not exactly be welcomed with open arms into a Division II league after competing with the best of the best in the section for decades. The second part, though, makes it much harder to move the Golden Eagles. "Us moving would require one other school or two other schools moving too, and that's a lot to ask during a realignment," Butler says. "So I think, I think the section is pretty set for now." If Del Oro stays, the SFL will be one of the few leagues that doesn't lose any members in this proposal and its traditional rivalries stay the same. Other local leagues were not so lucky. You can forget the word "foothill" when discussing the Foothill Valley League, as only two schools out of seven in the new proposal are nestled in the foothills. The first proposal brings in four new schools: Christian Brothers, Del Campo, River Valley and Yuba City while sending Lincoln, Ponderosa and West Park to new leagues. Placer, Nevada Union and Oakmont are projected to stay put. "I know that the section has an impossible task of trying to meet everybody's needs and they just can't," Placer football coach Joey Montoya says. "But what concerns me are the things that are real negatives to me like losing the old rivalries that we've made in the two previous leagues that we're in." Montoya said those rivalries are what brings the most fans to their games and while some, such as Placer-Del Oro or Placer-Colfax, can't exist anymore due to the sizes of the schools, others have become annual traditions that are being broken up by the new alignment. "Lincoln was taken out of our league and we inherited two Sacramento teams and two Yuba City teams instead of teams that are comparable in size and athletics like Twelve Bridges," Montoya said. "I just don't understand." Another thing to consider is travel time. While it makes sense athletically for Placer, Yuba City and Christian Brothers to be competing in most sports, the travel time is nearly an hour with no traffic. That is hard enough on Friday nights for football, but it's even more brutal for tennis and basketball players who have to make the trip on a Tuesday and go to school the next day. "There's no easy way to get there for us through traffic," Montoya says. "It just makes no sense to me or to drive to Yuba City that's an hour away from us. Nevada Union is even in a worse boat because they've got to travel two hours or hour and 45 minutes for a league game." Not all schools saw worse drive time with the latest proposals, however. The new Pioneer Valley League alignment sends Sutter, Twelve Bridges and Lindhurst out the door while welcoming Lincoln, Mesa Verde and Mira Loma. For Colfax and Bear River, that means spending more time on the Interstate 80 corridor, which coaches believe is a safer route for the athletes. "I'm very pleased with the realignment. It makes way more sense to us because getting to Marysville, Sutter, Wheatland and Lindhurst is so difficult for us," Colfax baseball coach Chris Nave said, noting that while Wheatland and Marysville are staying put, there is less travel for the Falcons overall. "There's no easy access to get over there. That's why this year's alignment is that much harder for us in my mind." Nave noted most students at smaller schools rely on their own transportation to road games and it is rare they get a bus. "Not having to travel Highway 174, 20 or 65 to get to these places as often is huge," says Nave, a retired California Highway Patrol officer who has seen bad accidents on those roads. "It's a dangerous ride for our kids to do that. This makes a lot more sense to me this way." Although he's pleased with the proposal as a whole, there were still aspects Nave felt didn't make sense. "It doesn't make much sense to me why Lincoln is coming down to our league from Division III to D-5," Nave says. "I just don't think they have any business in the PVL. They're too big and they'll just dominate." This proposal is the first of three meetings, which means it is not set in stone and changes likely will be made. "I don't have any strong feelings right now because I know so much will change, but it would be nice to have a little more competition in our league for sure," said Colfax girls basketball coach Rexanne Simpton, whose Lady Falcons have won three consecutive PVL titles and boast a 34-1 league record since 2018. Simpton said when Colfax travels to play current league opponents such as Sutter, it takes her an hour and a half to get home. Another aspect is the size of the leagues. Currently, there are seven eight-team leagues in the section, but this new proposal shows 11 eight-team leagues starting in 2024. That means fewer preseason tournaments and non-league games, which causes league play to be weighted much heavier for the discussion of postseason play. "The concern I think that people have in our league in all the sports is are we going to have teams that don't make the playoffs from our league in whatever sport that are really, really, really good teams and just placed near the bottom of our league," Cattolico says. "We could have teams that are a top-10 team in Sacramento, but they're not making the playoffs because they're in this league." Cattolico's Granite Bay Grizzlies finished 1-4 in SFL play and barely made the playoffs but advanced to the Division II section championship before falling to Manteca 51-48. Whitney finished last in the SFL at 0-5 and 3-7 overall but was still ranked by MaxPreps as the No. 9 D-II team in the section and No. 24 overall. "Some people have mentioned proposing that everybody from the SFL qualifies for the playoffs. What the section determines in who qualifies can determine who people may choose to schedule," Cattolico says. "If there's a threshold where you have to win a certain number of ballgames or if you have to come in a certain place in the league, all those are different dynamics as far as scheduling goes." There is still plenty to be sorted out in upcoming meetings, but where there's smoke, there's fire, and the first proposal is the product of months of discussions leading up to the first meeting. The next realignment committee meeting is scheduled for Feb. 7 at The Reserve at Spanos Park in Stockton. The proposed changes to Auburn-area leagues are as follows, with new teams italicized: Sierra Foothill League (Division I) Davis (from Delta), Del Oro, Folsom, Granite Bay, Jesuit (boys only, from Delta), Oak Ridge, Rocklin, St. Francis (girls only, from Delta), Whitney. Foothill Valley League (Division III) Christian Brothers (from Capital Athletic League), Del Campo (from CAL), Nevada Union, Oakmont, Placer, River Valley (from Capital Valley Conference), Yuba City (from CVC). Out: Lincoln (to PVL), West Park (to CVC), Ponderosa (to CVC). Pioneer Valley League (Division V) Bear River, Center, Colfax, Lincoln (from FVL), Marysville, Mesa Verde (from Golden Empire League), Mira Loma (from GEL), Wheatland. Out: Sutter (to GEL), Twelve Bridges (to GEL), Lindhurst (to Sierra Delta League). Central Valley California League (Division VII) John Adams Academy-Roseville (from Northern Pacific Athletic Conference), Encina, Forest Lake Christian, Foresthill, Futures, Sacramento Waldorf, Sierra Academy of Expeditionary Learning, Victory Christian. Out: Delta (to NPAC), Woodland Christian (to SDL)