CIF-SS schedules announced


	What:	CIF Southern Section HS Basketball Schedules
	When:	2003-2004 Season
	Where	Boys Basketball Schedules Girls Basketball Schedules

With this brief note, we're announcing the publication of the entire CIF-Southern Section season schedules for boys and girls teams for the 2003-04 season of sport.

We'll admit that we were initially asked not to post the entire schedules by some of the folks at the CIF. Why? Because, to paraphrase what we were told, the CIF-SS is locked in a death-grip struggle for control of its own destiny with the CIF State office. Seems the State CIF wants to have all of the various sections of the CIF fall into line when it comes to deciding who can and who can't pick sponsors for CIF playoff events. What this means, is that the State CIF office wants to control who sponsors all officially sanctioned CIF competition, from balls, to uniforms, to banners, and anything else you can think of which you might see at or near an athletic event. And what this means is that the State is trying to limit what the various sections can and can't do. The State has already told the Southern Section that it may have to fork over the $165,000-a-year title sponsorship which the CIF-SS has with Toyota, plus more than $85,000 in other deals that conflict with contracts the State has with other competing companies. So, this year, more than in any other year, money is a very big deal to the CIF-SS. Very big.

Now, what, you may ask, does money, and the fight for control of sponsorship have have to do with whether or not SoCalHoops publishes the CIF-SS basketball schedules? In our view, not much, but that view isn't shared universally.

It seems that for the past few years, ever since we began posting the schedules here at SoCalHoops, mostly as a way of generating fan interest and increasing attendance at CIF basketball games, the Southern Section office, which also publishes the schedules in a printed format and sells them for a modest price (about $5 or so), hasn't sold very many copies. In fact, they didn't sell a single copy last year. So we were asked to urge everyone to buy a copy of the schedules directly from the CIF. Ok, we're asking, because every penny counts.

But asking people to buy these schedules, alone, isn't going to get people out to the games, nor will it sell any tickets. This year, the requests we've received from fans who want to know what's happening, when and where the games will be this season, have been, in a word, overwhelming. We initially thought we might break the schedules down, week by week, but that proved just too labor intensive. So with this brief note, we're making the schedules available again, in the usual format: By league, and organized by school.

The way we figure it, by making high school schedules available for free to any fan who wants to know where and when a game is being played, we're doing far more for the CIF-SS than if they sold 15 or 20 (even 1,000 ) copies of the master schedule book. Here's why: By making the schedules available, we help to increase attendance at CIF-sanctioned games, which in turn results in schools receiving more money from increased ticket sales for pre-season tournaments and in-season games, which has the salutory effect of helping local schools, already cash-strapped and budget-sapped (and what local governmental agency in California isn't these days?), which translates into more schools being able to pay their CIF-SS membership dues (which some school districts have already said they may have trouble paying), which in turn helps the CIF-SS stay in business, and which also helps the CIF's "product" continue to be attractive to commercial sponsors, like Toyota, which in turn results in the CIF-SS receiving the $165,000 which it receives from the car-maker, and so on and so forth...

So the way we figure it, we're just doing everyone a huge favor by spending our time and energy on these schedules, so that you, loyal fans of the game that you all are, can go out and see some great high school basketball action.

Seriously, we hope everyone appreciates the work that the CIF-SS does in assembling and preparing these schedules (and we don't just mean typing them), and the efforts that are continually made by the CIF to find creative ways to finance high school sports so that kids everywhere in California will continue to have sports in their future as a part of the educational process.