Legacy Christian Academy joining CIF as associate member

Del Oro won’t be the only Bakersfield high school new to California Interscholastic Federation sports this season.

Legacy Christian Academy, a K-12 school that mixes home-schooling with in-person instruction, is joining CIF as an associate member beginning this fall.

“We’re just really excited to be able to compete in CIF and expand our gameplay for our students,” said Administrator and Head of School Paula Cowan.

Associate status means that Legacy will be able to compete against other CIF teams but will not participate in league or postseason competition. The school’s high school sports teams — which, during its time in independent athletics, have been known as the Lions — will include 8-man football (initially junior varsity), girls volleyball, boys and girls basketball, baseball and softball, as well as a wrestling club, Cowan said.

Registration opens Friday, and schedules are slated to come out in the next couple of weeks.

Legacy, which is located just west of Olive and Knudsen drives, opened in 2012 offering kindergarten through sixth grade and has added one grade each year since, gradually bolstering its athletic offerings along the way. Early high school teams competed in a home-school league and in California Christian Independent Football.

“So our high school sports program has run for about four years,” Cowan said, “and then COVID happened and everything kind of stopped, so as we’ve opened back up and our school has grown, we are moving into the associate membership with CIF.”

The impetus for the move, she said, was that Legacy’s teams became increasingly competitive and “needed more game time.” The new membership will also ease travel, as the school has had to repeatedly send its teams out of town, and can now face a wider array of local schools in Bakersfield and elsewhere in the valley.

Legacy will also hope to expand to tennis and track and field in the future, Cowan said.

Some uncertainty remains regarding the possibility for other homeschool students to join Legacy’s teams. Specifically, Legacy’s website and Cowan herself state that students of Heartland Charter School, which has a Bakersfield location on California Avenue, will be able to participate in Legacy sports through a CIF Multi-School Agreement.

Heartland Executive Director Courtney McCorkle and a CIF Central Section spokesperson both said

Monday that Legacy and Heartland were in the process of working out an agreement that had not been officially finalized.

The Legacy website indicates that home-schoolers from schools other than Legacy and Heartland will not be eligible to play.

Legacy’s sports programs will begin conditioning July 18 and practices Aug. 1.