The Peninsula Athletic League football coaches had their postseason league meeting this week and an idea that had been on the backburner for the last couple of years boiled over.
PAL football coaches voted Tuesday to explore a merger with the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League for a combined 32-team football league.
“Seventeen-to-1 (in favor),” said Steve Sell, Aragon football coach and PAL chairperson for football.
Sell said the SCVAL coaches meeting was Wednesday and the vote to merge was a unanimous 14-0 decision.
Mike Parodi, Hillsdale football coach who presented the argument for the merger during the PAL meeting, likened the decision by both leagues to a budding middle-school romance.
“We sent a note to them saying we kind of, maybe liked them, and they sent a note back saying they kinda liked us. We both told each other we kinda like each other. Now what do we do?” Parodi said. “Now we have to hang out with each other after school.”
The idea of a merger between two of the larger leagues in the Central Coast Section was initially broached in 2017, with the PAL deciding at that time it was not in its best interests.
But over the years, the discrepancy between the haves and have-nots have widened in both leagues. The PAL employs a league setup of three divisions of six teams apiece — with the top six playing in the Bay, the bottom six in the Lake and the remaining six in Ocean Division.
Over the last couple of seasons, however, fewer athletes are showing up for football and, for those teams that have consistently struggled, losing the entire football program becomes more and more a possibility.
“I think what happened is the gap is starting to widen between the really good programs and the next level and the next level after that,” Sell said.
Sell said it is getting more difficult to correctly distribute the 18 teams in the PAL and the merger would allow more teams to be more correctly placed.
“When you increase the numbers of teams, it’s a lot harder to misplace a team in the wrong league,” Sell said.
The proposed merger would feature four divisions of eight teams each.
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The SCVAL is at even bigger disadvantage because its 14 football teams are placed into two divisions of seven teams — the De Anza Division, which is equivalent to the PAL’s Bay Division, and the El Camino Division, which is akin to the PAL’s Lake. When the SCVAL makes its end-of-season rebalancing of the divisions, the first-place team from the El Camino is moved into the De Anza.
“That’s like taking the Lake Division champ and moving them into the Bay,” Sell said.
Parodi said part of his presentation to PAL coaches was to compile data taken from Calpreps.com, a website that uses an algorithm to accurately rank the strength of a team — and by extension a league. Calpreps.com is used by the Central Coast Section to determine the strength of teams for the their playoffs.
Parodi took three years of football information from Calpreps.com — 2017, 2018 and 2019. He took the website’s ranking of each of the teams in the two leagues and ranked them 1 to 32. Parodi then added up the three rankings to come up with an overall three-year strength number.
Parodi then compared that ranking to the strength number of the teams from 2021 and the numbers pretty much lined up.
“(In the PAL) we’re trying to figure out who should be in the bottom six, who should be in the top six. Those two groups need to make sure they’re playing the right teams,” Parodi said. “Now we’re using a pot of 32 teams (with the merger).”
Sell was quick to point out that this is far from being approved. The athletic directors for all the schools, along with school and district administrations, all still need to sign off the proposal.
“There is a long way to go on this. … This is by no means a done deal,” Sell said. “The ADs and the administrations have not chimed in.
“But I have talked to at least one principal in [the SCVAL] who said, ‘This has to happen.’ They’ve suffered from this (competitive) gap for years … and they’ve had enough.”
But if the bottom line is that both leagues are starting to see the widening gap in competitive balance and to preserve the game in both leagues, the PAL believes this merger needs to happen.
“We, as coaches, talk about, ‘Where can we make stuff better?’ As coaches, we do it for our programs. Every now and then we ask, ‘What can we do for the PAL?’” Parodi said. “Looking through the different lenses, how can we selfishly help our league? Maybe we need to be selfless and go back and talk to the SCVAL.
“It’s not going to be an us versus them, but us with them.”
(1) comment
Are the issues of fewer kids showing up for Football and lower ability related, in any way, to 1) parents' views of the turf fields rather than grass and 2) more generally, putting locked gates around fields during summer etc.? Nothing says 'play sports' to kids in neighborhoods like locked fields during holidays, summer etc.
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