A conversation with CIF Southern Section commissioner Mike West

Mike West is six weeks into his new job as commissioner of the CIF Southern Section, overseeing a section with more than 550 schools, more than 100 of which are adding a new sport this fall. (Photo courtesy of the CIF Southern Section)

LOS ALAMITOS — Administratively, this might not be the biggest jump in sports but it’s one that requires some adjustment.

Mike West was the principal at Riverside’s Martin Luther King High School, had been a former president of the CIF Southern Section executive committee, and also served on the CIF State executive committee and – given his roots as an athletic trainer – the state sports medicine advisory committee.

How much did that prepare him for the day-to-day nuts and bolts of running the section? The new Southern Section commissioner is still working through it, six weeks into his new job.

“When you’re an elected official, like as a school board member, you’re brought there and are dealing with policy,” he said. “You’re not dealing with the day-to-day functioning of a district if you’re a school board.

“Same thing with the executive committee. You know, we deal with the policy stuff, not the day-to-day stuff. And Rob (Wigod, the former commissioner) was very good about keeping that separate. We have a role as an executive committee and we serve that role very well. But outside of that, the office day-to-day stuff, that’s why (commissioners are) hired.”

The day-to-day stuff is now his baby. Wigod stepped down in July after 12 years running the section, and West took over on July 5. A good portion of that time has involved building relationships with his staff, and vice versa.

He’s also had another adjustment, and my first question, as a fellow resident of the Inland Empire, involved his commute from Riverside to Los Alamitos. Maybe an hour in the morning, he said – FasTrak helps – and between one and two hours coming home. The 91 during evening rush hour can be a beast, even the Express Lanes.

Many of the issues and policies under Wigod will remain the same under West.

The Southern Section will maintain its competitive equity playoff system for football, based on this year’s results, and West said he hopes one of the section’s leagues can submit a proposal for a section-wide vote to extend that system to most other team sports beginning with the 2024-25 school year.

“We can identify the schools that will qualify for the playoffs,” West said. “That’s not the difficult part. It’s where do we put them and where do we rank them?”

The motivation – report your results, potentially improve your playoff positioning – seems obvious but might take getting used to, particularly once implemented with sports that play multiple games in a week. West suggested a phone app or something similar would make it easier on coaches to report results immediately, rather than waiting until the next morning and maybe forgetting.

Transfers remain a fact of life, of course. The numbers were down during the COVID-19 pandemic but have returned to pre-pandemic levels, and while the high-profile transfers get most of the attention and scrutiny, assuming that all transfers are negative isn’t necessarily fair.

“You’ve got individual family circumstances and such things that there’s a need for (transferring), and a support system, if you will, for that to take place,” West said. “It’s only those that are not being upfront with all their information and finding, we’ll say, nefarious ways of finding avenues to maintain eligibility. That’s the key. And those are the things that once it’s brought to our attention, we are doing our research as best we can with the resources that we have. And I’m actually pretty impressed with the fact that we are actually able to, once identified, really address those when we can.”

There is a new wrinkle in the Southern Section this fall. Girls flag football is now an officially sanctioned sport, and 114 schools in the section will field teams this fall. And, with the addition of a new sport and the well-publicized shortage of game officials in many sports and especially football – or, as we maybe should reclassify it, boys football – it was reasonable to wonder if all the games could be staffed adequately.

“I don’t anticipate much strain for a couple of reasons,” West said. “One, we don’t have 560 schools all of a sudden getting into flag football.

“(And) they want to avoid the nights of (boys) football games. So we’re hearing a lot of schools are going to have Monday contests, maybe Saturday contests, but also having multiple games at the same site. So you’re going to have three schools go to one site (with each team playing two games). So if that’s to work out, we believe that with the number of officials we have, we’re going to be okay. You know, if all 560 started up, that’d be a challenge.”

The way West phrased it, it shouldn’t be hard to tap into enthusiasm for the 7-on-7 flag game: “Going in and playing Monday Night Football is really exciting for them.”

The officiating shortage, often exacerbated by coarsening fan behavior, is a nationwide issue in high school sports. In an attempt to calm things down, West said an athlete might get on the public address microphone before each game and read a script reminding spectators “to please, for lack of better words, ‘behave yourselves in the stands while I play. You know, I really appreciate your support, but we don’t need all the negative comments coming from the stands.’ To try to put practices like that in play, I think, will help in the long run.”

Beyond that, the current commissioner picked up on an idea offered by the former commissioner. Wigod suggested during our August conversation last year the idea of seeking individuals who have just completed their high school eligibility and might be interested in taking up officiating, to stay involved with their sport and make a few extra bucks doing so.

“That would be a great way to go,” West said. “You’ve got many students that … they’re not going to go on and play college sports, and even those that do could potentially (help). Like you’d get community college students that could come in and be a part of that pool, which I think actually that’s a pretty viable resource.

“… I think if we can get that initial group of kids out of high school and just get them in right off the bat, that we can get that influx there, and then it’s can we keep them in the system past those first few years?”

There is one more aspect of high school sports that the new commish feels strongly about. We’ll have that in Part II of our conversation tomorrow.

jalexander@scng.com