OUTLOOK ON NEW FOOTHILL AREA RELEAGUING: La Mirada athletics excited to face more equity-based teams with new conference

By Loren Kopff • @LorenKopff on X

This is the seventh and final part in a series of area schools involved in the upcoming Foothill Area releaguing that will begin in 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.

Not that La Mirada High needed to be in the spotlight anymore, but it’s athletic program has been the center of attention whenever there has been a changing of leagues since the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year. The Matadores didn’t ask to become a member of the slimmed down Suburban League after Artesia High, Cerritos High and John Glenn High left for better opportunities in the 605 League.

For four seasons, La Mirada felt it was cheated being in a league of four schools, knowing only the top two teams in every sport would get automatic playoff berths. This came after the Matadores were predominantly the powerhouse football program of the Suburban League, owning a .867 winning percentage in league games from 2007-2016. The girls soccer (.938), baseball (.817) and softball (.825) programs were also league tops during the same time before the vote was taken to allow the 605 League to form.

But as you know, football is the money-maker and sets the tone for any high school for the remainder of the school year.

“Honestly, I was upset because it all revolved around football,” said La Mirada athletic director Christine Mead when those three schools left the Suburban League. “Their argument was all around football. So, I was upset that they wanted to disband an entire league for a single Friday night. I honestly didn’t think it was going to happen; I did not think [the] CIF [Southern Section] would allow us to stay with just four teams. But obviously after the vote, that’s what they got, so they created the 605 League and we were left with Bellflower, La Mirada, Mayfair and Norwalk.”

For what it’s worth, the schools who voted to leave the Suburban League had a valid claim as the 2015 La Mirada football team trounced Artesia 63-0, Cerritos 76-0 and Glenn 63-0. In fact, the Matadores posted four shutouts over Cerritos from 2011-2016 while scoring 253 points and was all over Glenn in 2016 (70-10).

After four years of the smaller Suburban League, the four schools, were joined by the six from the San Gabriel Valley League, plus Firebaugh High to form the Suburban Valley Conference. Firebaugh was an independent school once the Suburban League was split and was added to give all five schools a better chance of earning an automatic playoff berth. In a four-school league, you get two playoff spots, while in a five-school league, three get automatic berths. This upcoming school year will be the fourth and final for that league as the new 20-school mega conference will give Mead a much better feeling than the once she had back in 2017.

“I’m more confident now because there were 10 of us that have a stake in this and so…we have a lot of different leagues coming to us asking for advice and questions,” said Mead. “Obviously the 605 and Del Rio [Leagues] are groups that wanted to come and join what we have because they saw what we have works. It creates that competitive equity amongst all sports, and you’re not stuck, for lack of a better word, playing the same teams even though they might annihilate you or you might annihilate them in certain sports year after year after year. It depends on your team’s level where you sit.”

While Cerritos has been the La Mirada of the 605 League when the Matadores were the kings and queens of the original Suburban League, they haven’t missed a beat since 2018. Of the major sports, La Mirada has captured 25 league championships, finished in second place 19 times and claimed third place 12 times. The baseball and softball programs have each won every league title since the shifting of leagues while the boys basketball program is on a roll with three straight Gateway League crowns plus the final one in the condensed Suburban League.

“In some sports, we might play Downey and Warren and in other sports, we might play Firebaugh and Lynwood, not saying that either one is good or bad,” she said of the 11-member Suburban Valley Conference. “But it’s all equitable; we were all lined up and cut in half and it makes it better for all students. When Del Rio and 605, and we even had the Almont League and other groups out there come to us and say tell us what works; tell us what doesn’t work, it was nice being in the driver’s seat with this one.”

Mead will never forget what happened when Artesia, Cerritos and Glenn wanted to leave the Suburban League. In the spring of 2017, a proposal passed 27-16 to allow those three schools to leave the Suburban League and join forces with Oxford Academy, Pioneer High and Whitney High to form the 605 League.

The vote was held at Hart High and the presentation that those three schools gave was football driven and how they were getting beat up on a consistent basis from La Mirada and Mayfair High. It was around the time that the CIF-SS began to turn towards competitive equity all around, not just from this league or that league.

“You’re not going to play the same four or five teams in every single sport all the way across the board as you would if you were in a traditional league that just had five teams,” said Mead of the new 20-school conference. “This one, we might never play Bellflower in football. We might not ever play Norwalk in softball because we’re in different leagues. And it’s better for both teams regardless of who’s the better team and who’s the worst team. If you’re going to play a team and beat them in football 63-0, that helps nobody. So, I like that.”

The Foothill Area had its vote for the new conference on May 1 at the Whittier Union High School District office and six different proposals were submitted by the 605 League, Del Rio League (including El Rancho High which is not part of the 20-school conference), Mission Valley League and Suburban Valley Conference. While all the proposals were similar in how the new leagues would be configured, Mead said she would be happy with any of them.

“We knew that we were good because it was the entire 605 League; it was the entire Del Rio League, minus El Rancho, and it was our entire [conference], minus Dominguez who was leaving us to go to a whole different area,” said Mead, who was not in attendance due to junior varsity softball obligations. “We weren’t disrupting any other conferences or leagues. We were pretty confident that as a group, we were going to be okay.”

One advantage La Mirada has over the new conference is that it has been used to playing in two leagues-Gateway and Mid-Cities. The new conference figures to feature three leagues, maybe even four leagues, to balance things out. Football will be tricky as only 18 schools field programs. But Mead believes it’s not automatic that the other sports will have four leagues of five teams each. In any event, plan on anywhere from nine to 12 automatic playoff berths in just about every sport out of 20 teams.

“Something what I try to tell people is if [my teams] win [a] CIF [championship], they don’t go in and say, ‘I’m a Division 4 CIF champion’,” said Mead. “They say, ‘I’m a CIF champion’. So, Division 4, Division 68…it doesn’t matter. It builds confidence within your kids because you’re going to win a championship.”

Mead says most of the La Mirada athletic programs should not have an advantage or disadvantage to which league they will be placed in because those teams have been playing schools from the 605 League and Del Rio League in non-league competition. For example, softball would not have an advantage or disadvantage to playing California High or La Serna High twice in league action.

She added that when the Suburban Valley Conference was formed, the 11 schools sat down for each sport, put them on paper and lined them up 1-11, per their MaxPreps rankings. That’s how the Gateway and Mid-Cities Leagues were formed. After that, it had been expected that the champion of the Mid-Cities League would move up to the Gateway League for the following season while the last place team from the Gateway League to relocate to the Mid-Cities League.

When it comes to all the challenges facing the athletic directors and principals of the 20 schools these next none to 10 months, Mead believes the biggest one is working out what works best for everyone. That’s what happened when the Suburban Valley Conference was formed.

“When we wrote the constitution, for the Suburban Valley [Conference], we sat down and had three or four different constitutions from different leagues and different conferences,” she recalled. “Some were from Orange County, and we just went through them basically page by page. Then we took our own constitutions and made sure that it worked for everybody.”