OUTLOOK ON NEW FOOTHILL AREA RELEAGUING – Cerritos to welcome new rivals, territory with expanded 20-school conference

June 17, 2025

By Loren Kopff • @LorenKopff on X

This is the second in a series of area schools involved in the upcoming Foothill Area releaguing that will begin for the 2026-2027 school year. The 20 schools involved in what will be a new conference are from the current 605 League, Del Rio League, Gateway League and Mid-Cities League. This is the third time since the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year that area schools have been involved in releaguing.

Cerritos High is hoping the new 20-school conference that will start up for the beginning of the 2026-2027 school year will be as good of a fit as the 605 League has been since the fall of 2018. But the Dons are no strangers to moving as this will be the fourth time in the past 30 years that the school has been part of releaguing.

Cerritos moved from the Mission Valley League to the Suburban League for the beginning of the 1998-1999 school year, then the 605 League and now the new mega conference.

“Back in the day, we were trying to build that conference with the seven teams in the Suburban League and add Pioneer to the mix,” said Cerritos athletic director Todd Denhart. “It was voted down three times. The disparity as far as competitive equity in the league was too much, and depending on the sport, too.

“I guess the biggest similarity would be it’s a necessity,” he continued. “We created the 605 League for a reason as far as competitive equity goes. Football-wise, three of the four schools have won league championships, and three of the four schools have been in the CIF football finals. Then depending on the sport, you can just go down sport by sport, and I just think this is kind of the same thing, but on a grander scale, obviously.”

Denhart, who was Cerritos’ head baseball coach from 2002-2007 remembers losing to La Mirada High 20-1 in 2002 and 21-3 the next season. He recalls the Suburban League tried to add an eighth school and divide the institutions into two leagues of four schools each, but that was voted down 4-3 three times.

So, as La Mirada and Mayfair High dominated the Suburban League in many sports until the 605 League was formed, one could say that Cerritos has been the dominant school the past seven years across the board. Not including badminton, boys and girls cross country, boys and girls golf, boys and girls swimming and diving, boys and girls track and field and boys and girls wrestling, Cerritos has won a 605 League championship 44 times and finished in second place 21 times, and if you add more league titles to the aforementioned sports, the school has become what La Mirada and Mayfair were when the Suburban League was comprised of Artesia High, Bellflower High, John Glenn High, Norwalk High, Cerritos, La Mirada and Mayfair.

“I didn’t foresee it, but it kind of came to light after [the 2023-2024 school year],” said Denhart of Cerritos’ dominance. “Our old principal, [Dr. Patrick] Walker and I and [former athletic director Robert] Adams talked about it a couple of times and said we need to be a little careful here…because we didn’t want to be seen that way. It was in our conscious mind, and we didn’t talk to our entire coaching staff, but we did talk to our coaches and said, ‘whether this is reality or not, if this is the perception we’re giving, perception is reality’, and we didn’t want that.”

At the Foothill Area releaguing meeting held on May 1 at the Whittier Union High School District office, Cerritos had initially voted for a proposal that would have involved five leagues, plus the 20-school Suburban Valley Conference. However, after two rounds of voting, it became clear that a different proposal, this one of the SVC and three leagues involving 16 schools, 12 schools and seven schools was going to be the one that would be the clear winner.

Denhart said that he and the rest of the 605 League athletic directors and principals had talked to other athletic directors from the SVC, who were all in agreement on what they were going to do.

“Basically, the proposals after that as far as we were concerned, were that the [Gateway League and Mid-Cities League] and our proposal reflected what we wanted to do as a group of 20 schools,” said Denhart. “The reason our [initial proposal] was kind of left everyone else alone [was] nobody reached out to us.”

He continued by saying how he remembered going through the same thing when the 605 League was being proposed and the athletic directors of the six schools reached out to two or three other leagues and asked if they could have five minutes at the beginning of their athletic director meetings and pitched what they wanted and why they were joining forces to form the 605 League.

“Nobody had done that with any of the schools in the 605 League for this [latest] releaguing, which we felt was kind of odd,” said Denhart. “So okay, nobody reached out to us. Our proposal is going to be these 20 schools in the Suburban Valley Conference. Nobody has said anything to us; we’re going to leave it the way it is.”

Denhart says the first meeting of the 20 or so athletic directors of the new conference will take place just before school begins in August. Then, for the next 10 to 11 months, the schools will work on a plethora of items with scheduling and transportation being the biggest two.

Among those items will be how the 20 schools will be divided into three or four leagues, what to call those leagues, and the entire conference, and will the schools go off the current CIF rankings or something else. For football, there will be 18 schools as Oxford Academy and Whitney High don’t field programs.

“I think you have to go four [leagues], honestly,” said Denhart. “If you want to include football here, I think what the goal for our conference should be is to maximize our playoff spots. Including football in the conversation, you go, for football only, three leagues of six, which gives you nine [automatic] entries. That would be my number one item on the agenda.”

Denhart believes, in theory, that all the Cerritos sports will benefit from the new 20-school conference to add even more competitive equity. The softball program has won all six 605 League titles to date while the football program has won the past four league championships. The baseball, girls soccer, boys volleyball and girls volleyball programs finished in first place every season before coming in second place this past school year.

One area of concern the 20 schools will be facing is the number of lower level programs they have among their athletic teams. Cerritos fields two or three lower level teams in some programs while other schools in the new conference don’t. Because of that, Denhart says that hurts Cerritos a bit.

“Our girls basketball [program]; our numbers have dwindled over the last three or four years,” said Denhart. “I don’t know if that’s part of coming out of Covid. Coming out of Covid, everybody wanted to join [out athletic teams]. Our softball team had 22 kids on the varsity roster that first year, but the boys basketball numbers haven’t gone down. I don’t want to blame it on the league, but basketball…our school and our size, we need to field three teams. Some of the schools in our league, with their enrollment numbers, you can’t field three teams. It’s just not feasible.”

When it comes to renewing rivalries when the new conference begins, whether by city, school district or otherwise, there’s a better than 50 percent chance that Cerritos and Gahr High will face each other in league competition, whether coaches or athletic directors like it or not, especially in football.

What was supposed to be an annual game for the Silver Milk Jug has not been played continuously. The two baseball programs haven’t faced each other in over 30 years, and the softball programs have played here and there over the past 28 years. Even the boys and girls soccer programs used to have yearly doubleheaders under the lights at Dr. Hanford Rants Stadium.

“Some sports, it’s not beneficial to either team,” said Denhart of the rivalry with Gahr. “Is [Gahr baseball head coach] Gerardo [Perez] going to come here to play us in baseball? It would be like me playing La Mirada. Nobody benefits from it. If we’re in the same league, then we’re comparable to them, and then we’ll do what we have to do. [Boys basketball head coach] Jonathan [Watanabe] plays them every year, and we’ve renewed the whole football thing; we’ll play them again next year.”

Another big decision the athletic directors will have to agree on is how many teams from the projected four leagues will move up and down each year on a sport by sport basis. Will it be just the league champion and the last place team, which is the model used in the Gateway and Mid-Cities Leagues? Or will it be two teams? If it’s just one team moving in what could be a three-league football scenario, then the fourth place football team could be in no man’s land with little to no chance of movement.

“After this thing gets going, whether it’s one or two move up or move down, the [CIF-Southern Section] rankings don’t matter,” said Denhart. “When we ended our football season [in 2024] in the first round, we didn’t play for the next seven weeks all the way to the state championship. But for seven weeks, our ranking went up, and we weren’t playing.”

Denhart said the process of this releaguing went much smoother than he originally thought as far as Cerritos is concerned and speaking on what the 20 schools were looking to do. But the one main reason for this releaguing is competitive equity, he continued to add.

“I think it’s in the best interest for our athletic programs and will benefit all our teams.” said Denhart. “Maybe not in year one will all the coaches be happy. But I think two or three years into it, the coaches will say, ‘hey, this was the right thing for us’.”