Local rivalries at risk when NCS realignment arrives
Rivalries are the lifeblood of high school sports.
Yes, there are state championships and national rankings and elite talents, but year in and year out, those traditional rivalries matter the most.
And when the North Coast Section (NCS) completes its realignment process in April, Miramonte may not be in the same league as archrivals Acalanes and Campolindo.
Even now, the Matadors are in a different division of the Diablo Athletic league (DAL) in football than the other two Lamorinda schools, forcing them to use two of their non-conference games to continue the long-running series against their neighboring Lamorinda schools. But really, it would be unthinkable for the schools not to play each other. After all, the players have grown up competing against each other, and the parents have sat in the stands or walked the sidelines with the families of their opponents.
But change is in the air, on two fronts.
First, NCS will have leagues just for football starting in the fall of 2028, and those six-team leagues will be determined by the two-year MaxPreps’ computer ratings of the 30 teams that play football in the Valley Conference.
And yes, this is where things get complicated.
First, NCS is divided into conferences, and Miramonte, Acalanes, Campolindo and Las Lomas are in the Valley Conference. By NCS rule, all leagues in the Valley Conference must be made up of Valley Conference teams – which means that schools on the Bay side of the hills are off limits for league formation.
So Piedmont, for example, cannot be in a league with Miramonte, nor can San Leandro. Only the 30 Valley Conference schools can be considered, and they very likely will be divided into six-team leagues. (Nothing is final at this point, but the direction of NCS is clear in many cases – and the six-team leagues are pretty much a done deal.)
Next up are the MaxPreps’ ratings. These are a numerical grade for each team, produced by a proprietary computer formula that only MaxPreps has access to. My experience with MaxPreps – I did their national girls’ rankings for many years – showed me the ratings are, by the end of a season, fairly accurate, but with so few games on a football schedule, bad luck and/or injuries can mask the true strength of a team.
In addition, the strength of the team two years ago may have little relation to the strength of the team in the coming season, due to graduation or the addition of talented players.
Regardless, NCS will combine the 2026 and 2027 ratings and produce a list, from one to 30, that ranks the Valley Conference football teams. The top six will be in one league, regardless of location or rivalries, the next six in a second league, and so on.
The likelihood of Miramonte, Campolindo and Acalanes all being in the same league is vanishingly small. The likelihood of all three being in different leagues is high.
And since the schedule will reserve the last five weeks of the season for league play, even if Miramonte schedules both Campo and Acalanes, those games will be early in the year, a far cry from the days when those rivalry games came at or near the end of the season.
Even more problematic is the possibility that the three schools will be in different leagues for all other sports, making scheduling rivalry games even more complicated. All three schools are now in the DAL, a 13-team league that divides itself differently for each sport – which is why Miramonte’s football games against Acalanes and Campolindo are not league games this year. For most sports, however, the schools are in the same division.
Naturally, the Acalanes Union High School District (AUHSD) is pushing hard for all four of its schools to be in the same league, but even though that certainly makes sense from a parochial viewpoint, it might not make sense for the Valley Conference as a whole. And of course there are a host of proposals for the new leagues, all designed to further the interest of this set of schools or that particular school district.
The process is under way, and there have already been hearings and meetings, with the final vote for the 2028 leagues scheduled for April 2027. (The lag time between the vote and the implementation is to give teams time to schedule non-league games once they know which schools are in their league.) The final decision will be made the NCS as a whole, which includes 175 schools, most of which will have zero interest in whether Miramonte plays Campolindo in tennis each year.
The decision will likely ratify whatever the Realignment Committee comes up with, and that committee will, like all such committees, try to balance competing agendas. It could be that the DAL will remain much the same for everything but football – though Berean Christian is surely gone – and local rivalries will remain intact.
But it’s also possible that the four AUHSD schools will be split up, and rivalry games may not be played. After all, scheduling is complicated and it may be that the girls’ lacrosse coach at Campolindo simply does not want, or can’t find room for, Miramonte on the non-league schedule.
Losing these kind of rivalry games would be sad and painful.
They are the heart of high school competition and community engagement. We can only hope that the AUHSD and the Lamorinda high schools are successful in lobbying to keep Miramonte, Campolindo and Acalanes in the same league, and that NCS understands the importance of supporting these long-standing community rivalries.
Unfortunately, hope is pretty much all we have at this point, as the process is nearing its completion – but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to reach out to new NCS commissioner Bri Niemi at bniemi@cifncs.org and make your feelings known.