California Voice: In high school football, state champions of competitive equity take the field

In their football season opener, St. Pius X-St. Matthias Academy, a Catholic school in Downey in Los Angeles County, lost 38-0. The next week, the school’s Warriors fell 56-14. 

Six consecutive losses followed before St. Pius X-St. Matthias notched its first win. But after dropping their regular season finale, the Warriors, with a 1-9 record, thought their season was over.

Except it wasn’t.

Instead, the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) awarded St. Pius X-St. Matthias Academy a berth in the Division 8 football playoffs for the Southern Section. Given second life, the team ran off five consecutive victories and advanced to a state championship game.

How? The answer involves a peculiar California application of a controversial word: 

Equity.

Equity is the most powerful of the three values embodied in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). It’s also controversial, because it goes beyond equality and demands disrupting existing systems to achieve fair outcomes. 

Equity now faces a fierce backlash, including the rollback of DEI programs in universities and workplaces. But intriguingly, the quest for equity is alive and advancing in California high school sports.

Indeed, “competitive equity” has become a guiding principle of CIF, the school sports governing body, particularly in how it chooses teams for the playoffs.

Since California is too big to include al high schools in a single playoff tournament, CIF has long organized teams into divisions for playoffs. In each division, all schools are supposed to be on the same competitive level.

But they weren’t, until competitive equity.

Why not? Because divisions were based on factors other than team performance. For decades, divisions were based on school enrollment. But that wasn’t a good proxy for sports excellence. Smaller private schools with wealthy boosters could recruit players and build programs stronger than those of big, budget-stretched public schools. 

In the 2010s, CIF officials concluded that the best way to make division playoffs fair was to use a rankings system for all teams. After some adjustments, this “competitive equity” system ranks teams at the end of each season, and places them in playoff divisions with teams of similar rankings. 

This means that each year, different schools end up in different divisions. The playoffs often produce surprises.

None more surprising than St. Pius X-St. Matthias.

The team was a playoff contender because the competitive equity rankings count not just wins and losses, but strength of schedule. And nine of the 10 teams the Warriors played qualified for the playoffs.

But the Warriors had to be lucky. When the CIF creates a division, it first includes all the automatic playoff qualifiers — league champions. It then uses competitive equity rankings to add teams with records of .500 or better. But in Division 8, there weren’t enough at-large teams with .500-or-better records to fill the 16-team field. So, St. Pius X-Matthias got a spot.

In the playoffs, the young Warriors raised their game and won four in a row to take the Southern Section championship. 

In the regional final, they played the San Diego section champion, St. Augustine, which had lost all 10 regular season games, but had a brutal schedule and won a playoff spot under competitive equity.

A regional final between two teams with a combined record of 1-19 drew national attention. “I don’t make the rules, I just follow them. They want competitive equity,” Warriors coach Devah Thomas said. “We fit the criteria.” 

The Warriors’ run ended with a state championship game loss to the 12-2 Sonora High School Wildcats, from Tuolumne County. 

But competitive equity’s winning streak continues. This school year, the CIF Southern Section extended competitive equity beyond football and basketball to playoffs in all sports. 

The critics didn’t complain. Why not? Maybe that’s because this is sports, where equity creates entertaining games, rather than human resources edicts. Or maybe it’s easier to see in the Warriors’ season what equity was supposed to do all along: give people who faced tougher opposition a fair chance to be champions.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.