SECTION CONSIDERS LESS PRACTICE TIME
The California Interscholastic Federation-Southern Section Council on Thursday voted to support a statewide proposal that would cut in half the amount of time football teams can conduct full-contact practices during the season.
Currently, California high school teams can have full-contact practices twice a week during the season, with a maximum of 90 minutes of full contact on each of those two days. The proposal would limit the maximum to 45 minutes of full contact on each of those two days.
The CIF State Federated Council votes on the proposal at its meetings April 6-7. Representatives of the CIF State’s 10 sections, including the Southern Section, will be at those meetings.
Corona del Mar football coach Dan O’Shea said his team has not been doing 90 minutes of full contact in a practice, but still found the potential reduction to 45 minutes unnecessary.
“I could see going from 90 minutes a day down to 60,” O’Shea said. “It would be a challenge to meet the new requirement.”
O’Shea wonders how such a reduction will be enforced, as does San Clemente coach Jaime Ortiz. Ortiz also is concerned that teams won’t been given enough time to teach non-varsity players safe and correct tackling methods.
“This is going to dramatically change what we do from a coaching and teaching standpoint,” Ortiz said. “Teaching freshmen and sophomores proper tacking techniques and form is a big part of our practice plan.”
The CIF-SS Council also voted to support a statewide proposal that would not allow CIF State member schools to play games against out-of-state schools that are not allowed to participate in their own state playoffs. Schools that fall into that category are IMG Academy of Florida, Montverde Academy of Florida, Oak Hill Academy of Virginia and Findlay Prep of Nevada. That rule would go into effect starting with the 2019-20 school year.
IMG Academy’s baseball team is in
the local National Classic tournament that begins April 2. Mater Dei’s boys basketball team played Montverde in January.
Two proposals exclusive to the CIF-SS that did not pass: a proposal that would have allowed the mandatory three-week summer “dead period” of no school-supervised athletic activity to be divided into three separate weeks; and a proposal that in the CIF-SS water polo playoffs would have made the higherseeded team the home team throughout the CIF-SS playoffs. Currently, when two teams meet after the first round of the playoffs the team with the fewest number of home playoff games is the home team, or a coin flip determines the home team.