New Season, New Rules: CIF Schedule Changes

Starting this fall, playoff placements for the CIF Southern Section (CIF-SS) will no longer be determined by the size of the school. Instead, each sport from each school will be evaluated by their performance from the past two seasons.“They have some kind of a formula: they take your past records, what they call ‘strength of schedule,’ what team you play against and how highly they’re ranked normally. They take all of that into consideration, and use a formula that goes through and ranks every team,” athletic director Tim Ballaret said.This new placement will affect sports that use bracket playoffs such as basketball, soccer and golf, but will not affect sports such as track and field and cross country, which are evaluated by championship meets.“They use two years of data from before, they don’t use your current season, but I’d like them to just start using the current season so if [each sport] includes that, it makes it a more accurate ranking system, but I think it’ll be good in the long run,” Ballaret said.Prior to each season, schools will need to input the required information online in order to qualify and receive their groupings. In addition to the new requirements and algorithms, teams in the same league may be scattered into different divisions, leading to more competitive matches for Samo.“I think this [is] both beneficial and detrimental because the girls basketball program this year has big goals for our girls and improving our reputation as being stronger than our previous year will give us an advantage against those who were previously in the same level and we will also grow stronger competing with higher level teams,” girls basketball player Jasmine Karkafi (’19) said.Decided by representatives from the different leagues of the CIF-SS, the competitive equity is supported by many schools who are now looking forward to playing against other teams of equal or similar strength.“It passed at a meeting in January with 74 coaches or leagues in favor, 10 opposed and one abstained. It’s overall very much accepted for the future and it’s accepted by the people who would like the opportunity to compete in playoffs based on how they’ve done and their level of play,” girls soccer coach Jimmy Chapman said.Chapman also encourages teams to look beyond the new playoff structure and do the best they can.“One of our assistant varsity coaches, Arthur Jozkowitz, said ‘You just gotta play the game, play the opponent in front of you and not focus so much on who’s playing up, who’s playing down, you just play the person and you play the team in front of you and you prepare the best you can and you do absolute best,’” Chapman said.