Blog Post: Agoura High Football Should be Helped by One of Two Major Changes for the Marmonte League

As the Agoura High football team works towards the early start of the 2012 season - the Chargers begin with a home game against Oak Park on August 24 - some things will be different and some things will remain the same in the competitive and controversial world of Marmonte League football circa 2010-2013.

One interesting thing about the opener is that it pits against each other the two teams that were probably most affected by the opening of the Oaks Christian School in 2000.

That's saying a lot considering Oaks Christian is located in Westlake Village, conspicuously close to Westlake High, and those two teams have played one another in the CIF title game the past two years.

But Oak Park was directly impacted by Oaks Christian initially as the two schools competed in the Tri-Valley League and the Lions won their first CIF football championship by defeating Oak Park, 21-16, in 2003. It was the first of six straight titles for Oaks Christian football.

Oak Park and Agoura took direct hits by losing players to Oaks Christian. And although Westlake may not have been as adversely affected as those two schools, at least early on, Westlake head coach Jim Benkert was keenly aware that the dynamics of high school football in the area would be changed.

"They opened the school and all of a sudden kids started wanting to flock there and there was a big mystique about Oaks Christian," Benkert said in a recent interview. There will be more discussion on that here as the summer progresses, but for now, we will concentrate on the changes in store for Marmonte League football this coming fall and how it will impact Agoura High.

Two big changes: The league format is different as are the playoffs

After two years which have dismayed most of the Marmonte League team, the league was split into two five-team divisions, meaning only five out of 10 regular season games will be required to be against league foes as compared to nine the last two years.

The Marmonte League jumped from an eight-team league to a 10-team league after St. Bonaventure, of Ventura, and Oaks Christian stormed into the league for football only in 2010. With only 10 regular season games, the addition of those two teams meant that instead of having three non-league games, teams would only have one.

The seven teams in the league - those other than Westlake, Oaks Christian and St. Bonaventure - are relieved that the two years of being required to play all three of those teams in league games are over.

"What it's allowed us to do is add a few teams we wouldn't have on the schedule," said Agoura head coach Charlie Wegher. "We're dropping Westlake, obviously. We're going to drop St. Bonaventure and we're going to add Oak Park and Golden Valley." 

The East Division of the Marmonte League will include Agoura, Moorpark, Thousand Oaks, Calabasas and Oaks Christian. The West Division will house Westlake, St. Bonaventure, Royal, Simi Valley and Newbury Park.

Agoura will keep Newbury Park and Royal on its schedule as non-league games. Those contests will count only in the overall won-loss records of the teams, not the league records. And they will allow the schools to maintain the rivalries that they've shared.

Hoping that more games are competitive, not blowouts

"We're playing schools that are neighborhood schools that don't typically have a lot of kids out of their attendance area," said Wegher. "And that's a more competitive situation for us because that's what we do."

After opening up against Oak Park, Agoura will play Ventura, Newbury Park, Golden Valley and Royal. After a bye week, the Chargers open Marmonte League play against Oaks Christian.

After four scheduled Marmonte League games, each league team will face a league opponent from the other division in Game 10. Those contests will determine playoff spots and league rankings.

The first-place teams in each division will play each other with the winner being the top seed from the Marmonte League and the loser becoming the second seed. Third and fourth place in league will be determined by the game between the two teams that finish in second place in the East and West Divisions. And so on.

Only the top four seeds (all four teams that finish first and second in both league divisions) will receive guaranteed playoff spots. One or more wildcard teams are expected to be selected for the postseason. The change to this format for the next two years is something welcomed by league teams that have struggled the past two seasons.

"It just wasn't working," said Wegher, referring to the four-year deal to add St. Bonaventure and Oaks Christian to Marmonte League football from 2010-2013, which was a decision by the CIF [California Interscholatic Federation] that many think was made too hastily and without giving the member schools enough time to digest and contest the idea.

"It works for three teams," Wegher said. "The other seven schools it doesn't work for, so it's just something we had to do. You were getting these huge blowouts every week and that's not good for anybody and it's not good for the sport.

"It's supposed to be competitive," he added, "and when it's not, you'd better do something to make it competitive. So we're tying to do that."

Will the new playoff format help Marmonte League teams?

The Marmonte League teams that make the playoffs will almost certainly not dominate in the fashion that they did the past two postseasons. In the fall of 2010, three of the four CIF semifinalists in the Northern Division were from the Marmonte League and last year all four teams were.

And, of course, both teams - Oaks Christian and Westlake - that played in the CIF finals those two years also represented the Marmonte League. This coming postseason, the league was moved out of the Northern Division and into the ultra-competitive Pac 5.

Playing in the Pac 5 means that playoff encounters can include football powerhouses such as Servite, Long Beach Poly, Mater Dei and Mission Viejo. And there are a slew of other very good teams in the Pac 5 every year.

For Benkert and Westlake, the change may mean something different than it does for Wegher and Agoura.

"I think in the Northern Division, maybe you had to play two [competitive] games till the title," Benkert said. "Now, you can't mess up in the early rounds. Can you survive four [tough games] rather than two? That's going to be the issue."

But for schools other than Westlake, Oaks Christian and St. Bonaventure, the move to the Pac 5 may only increase the sense of haves and haves-not within the league for two more years.

"Again, the rest of the league is paying the price for the success of the three private schools, Westlake, St. Bonaventure and Oaks Christian - and they'll continue to do well," said Wegher.

"Thousand Oaks and Moorpark, they won first round playoff games last year, so they'll continue to do okay. But the five other teams in our league - I can't see any of those five teams matching up well with any of those teams for the Pac 5," Wegher added.

A slip of the tongue, but a telling one

Wegher's reference to the three league behemoths, Westlake, Oaks Christian and St. Bonaventure, as "the three private schools" was a slip of the tongue. Westlake is a public school and Wegher is not prone to sarcasm.

Still, the lumping of Westlake with those two private school powers is not without its irony. Last fall, when Thousand Oaks visited Westlake in the CIF semifinals, a 62-0 rout for Westlake, the visiting fans showed up with a banner proclaiming: "Welcome to Westlake University."

It was an allusion, no doubt, to the amount of players that Westlake had on its roster as a result of inter-district transfers. Although from the Westlake perspective, it can be argued that it was simply a reference to the dominance Westlake has displayed - at least over the other six public schools in the league - in recent years, and the passions that dominance can engender.

"I think Oaks Christian coming into the league helped us to get over and to become an elite football team," Benkert said in an interview about Bill Redell's retiring as the Lions head coach. And about the move to the Pac 5, Benkert added, "The football teams that are the elite of the Marmonte League, I think can play with anybody."

But for the other public schools in the league, Agoura, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, Simi Valley, Royal, Newbury Park and Calabasas, the move to the Pac 5 only makes the possibility of winning a CIF championship more remote than it already was the minute Oaks Christian and St. Bonaventure entered the fray.

Lou Lichtl, the Thousand Oaks principal, who has had stints as athletic director at both Westlake and Thousand Oaks, led a contingent from the Marmonte League which tried to convince the CIF not to add the league to the Pac 5 for the playoffs.

That move, he contended, would mean teams traveling to and from Orange County during rush hour on Friday nights. That alone, it was argued, would become an unreasonable hardship.

"Nobody even listened," Wegher said. "They went to the meeting and it was like you might as well have been speaking a different language and nobody cared. It's just not a good fit. For the top of our league, maybe; for the bottom, no. It's just more poor leadership by CIF, allowing this."