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Fryer: Orange County releaguing plans just got more interesting

April 27, 2023

Maybe the Trinity League football group stays as it is.

Or maybe the top six football programs in Orange County are placed in the same league, with a potential mix of public and private schools in that group.

And perhaps the Freeway League stays out of the football-only league plan and keeps its six schools together for football and everything else.

Orange County high school athletic directors met Monday to discuss possibilities for new league structures that will be in place for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years.

The plan for football-only leagues gathered support. That plan would be the creation of leagues that exist only in football. Those football leagues would be organized by using teams’ performances of the past two seasons to create a power-points profile and using that profile to place teams in football leagues. That power-points profile would be weighted: 65 percent would come from the most recent of the two seasons, with the other 35 percent derived from the first of the two seasons.

Three variations of the football leagues plan came out of the athletic directors meeting.

One of those three football proposals could lead to high-performing public school football teams like Los Alamitos and Mission Viejo landing in a six-team league with national powerhouses Mater Dei and St. John Bosco. If that proposed system was in place now Los Alamitos and Mission Viejo would be in that six-team group for the 2023 football season and current Trinity League football teams JSerra and Servite would not.

After that group of the top six power-points profile teams is assembled a second-tier group of six teams would be assembled and so on.

And that’s where the Freeway League comes in with this football-only leagues model. La Habra’s football team might be in that second-tier league with the likes of Edison, San Clemente and Yorba Linda, but La Habra’s other sports teams would remain in the current Freeway League, a league that’s been the same for 41 years, with Buena Park, Fullerton, Sonora, Sunny Hills and Troy.

But most of the Freeway League’s six schools want to stay out of the football-only leagues business and wants to remain intact for all sports. At least one school, though, would like to see La Habra playing elsewhere.

La Habra has won 21 of the past 25 Freeway League football championships, has won 93 of its past 95 league games and last season went 5-0 in the league with an average winning margin of 29 points.

Some Orange County athletic directors prefer that the Trinity League football group stay as it is, then using the power points profile system to organize the other 69 11-man football teams in the Orange County Area. The Orange County Area is not strictly based on geography, as St. John Bosco of Bellflower is placed in the Orange County Area for league affiliation purposes.

Mission Viejo football coach Chad Johnson supports that idea.

“If everything is equal,” Johnson said, “then I have no problem having the best teams grouped with the best teams. But when there are a lot of inequities … can we really make it equal or do we keep it separated?”

Johnson was an assistant coach at St. John Bosco so he knows about the inequities. Yes, Mission Viejo and many other public schools in a variety of sports get talented transfers and have student-athletes who reside outside of their attendance areas.

The large private schools’ major advantages are in fundraising. Most of the county’s public school football programs don’t have a golf tournament that raises thousands of dollars, something that is as common in the Trinity League as a pregame prayer.

And there’s more, like coaching stipends.

“When I was at Bosco we had an admissions department that helped us get out there to get kids and we had a much higher budget,” Johnson said. “I know coaches who were at my school who went from being a varsity coach here to working at Santa Margarita as a freshman coach where they’re making three times more than they made here.

“I want a budget that matches the teams we’re going to be in a league with, an advancement department to run a gala and a golf tournament to raise money like Mater Dei does. If we can do that, then put us in that league.”

Orange County high school principals meet May 15 at Christ Cathedral to discuss the proposals and select one that will be the way leagues will exist for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years.

That will be fun.

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Orange County Register

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Fryer: Orange County releaguing plans just got more interesting

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