The Sobrato football program is out of the Tri-County Athletic League, and the theoretical monkey wrench in TCAL football officials’ scheduling chores just became a reality.
In an emergency meeting Thursday at Alvarez High in Salinas, the TCAL Board of Managers reached a consensus without an official vote to grant a request by Sobrato High to withdraw its football team from the league.
Sobrato, which is in its first year of existence and currently has just ninth and 10th grade classes, had committed to joining TCAL in 2005, when its current sophomores will be capable of fielding varsity teams. The school had planned to exit TCAL alongside Morgan Hill’s other high school, Live Oak, to join the Blossom Valley Athletic League in 2006.
The board also discussed possible realignment in light of the Sobrato defection at Thursday’s meeting, as Sobrato principal Rich Knapp apologized for his handling of the situation.
The decision to bypass the one-year slot in TCAL was entirely based on concerns about safety and competitiveness, said Knapp.
But he admitted that the withdrawal had not been handled in the best possible way.
“I owe the league an apology,” Knapp said. “I didn’t handle this in a timely manner. I should have raised the issue in the fall. As a result this has caused some hardship to schools in the league.
“But again, the safety of our kids is the most important factor.”
According to Southern Conference chairman Duane Morgan, also an assistant principal at TCAL member San Benito High, the problem wasn’t the concern for the athletes.
“It was the scheduling conflicts that would arise,” he said.
Faced with the late withdrawal of Sobrato, TCAL football officials will now have to scramble to schedule non-league opponents or shorten their 2005 football fixtures.
And they’re not happy about it.
“It was a two-year process to have (Sobrato) enter the league and then in November we asked them if they were sure they wanted to be in the TCAL for football and they said yes,” Live Oak athletic director Mark Cummins said when Sobrato first submitted its request. ” I can’t believe that after all we went through that they’re trying to pull this. This doesn’t sit well with a lot of people.”
Gilroy High head football coach Darren Yafai said simply: “We’ve been hung out to dry.”
Sobrato now gains independent status for its football program, and almost assuredly will not need Central Coast Section approval for the change, according to CCS assistant commissioner Steve Stearns and Morgan.
Stearns and Morgan pointed to the precedent set by San Francisco’s Sacred Heart-Cathedral, a member of the West Catholic Athletic League which pulled its football program out of the WCAL this year in favor of independent status.
“It’s a done deal,” said Morgan of the Sobrato withdrawal.
For his part, Knapp said Sobrato would avoid scheduling football teams from ‘A’- and ‘B’-rated leagues such as the TCAL, Monterey Bay League and the Blossom Valley Athletic League for the 2005 season, in keeping with school officials’ concern for the safety of student-athletes.
Meanwhile, Morgan said several proposals were put on the table for realignment of the Southern Conference, which includes the TCAL, MBL, Mission Trail Athletic League and Santa Cruz Coast Athletic League. Aside from various tweaks that would maintain the leagues as they are, the big proposal put forward was to create an “equity league” similar to the “power conference” structure in Santa Clara County.
With a few variations preferred by different interests, this proposal would place all Southern Conference teams in a single pot, or equity league, matching schools sport-by-sport in divisions within the league based on their competitiveness in that particular sport.
Whatever the decision reached on realignment, Morgan said it was clear the status quo in the TCAL was untenable.
“We discussed a lot of different options for realignment. We can’t have a five-school league.”
The conference chairman urged relevant school officials and the public to mark Feb. 17 on their calendars, the date of a 4pm Southern Conference realignment subcommittee meeting at Palma High in Salinas.
– Staff writers Brett Edgerton and Jim Johnson contributed to this report.
