The CIF Southern Section wants to add an assistant commissioner whose sole responsibility would be determining the eligibility of student-athletes who transfer.
The assistant commissioner in charge of transfer eligibility will also have a program coordinator to assist with those duties.
Before the Southern Section can do that, said CIF-SS chief financial officer Mitch Carty, the Southern Section office must be relocated to a larger building.
Carty made the announcements Tuesday at the CIF Southern Section Council meeting in Long Beach. The council is the Southern Section’s legislative body that is made up of CIF-SS league representatives. Tuesday’s meeting was the second of three council sessions this school year.
The amount of time that CIF-SS staff spends on examining transfer requests has become too taxing for the current staff, Carty said. In the 2024-25 school year, the Southern Section office processed 7,099 transfer requests.
“We found in talking to the assistant commissioners and their program coordinators that it was taking up about 90 minutes a transfer,” Carty said, who estimated that comes to about 956 work hours a year. “That’s a tremendous load on the assistant commissioners that we have in the office.”
Carty said that the addition of 10 sports over the past 12 years has added to the staff’s workload.
The CIF-SS office has been in Los Alamitos since 2002. The Southern Section has begun searching for office space in Buena Park and Cypress. Carty said that while the geographic center of the Southern Section in terms of area is Pomona, the center in terms of member schools locations is the Buena Park-Cypress area.
A third added staff member would assist with marketing and corporate sponsorships.
“Once we have space secured,” Carty said, “we can begin our search for the three new positions.”
Carty said the Southern Section is proposing that CIF-SS member schools sports annual dues of $100 per sport would increase to $200 a sport to help offset costs of purchasing or leasing a new office and for the salaries of the three added staff members.
Carty said the Southern Section wants to avoid increasing admission prices for spectators.
The CIF-SS Council will vote on the proposed budget at its April session, the final session of this school year.
The Southern Section owns its building in Los Alamitos. The sale of the building would create revenue for the lease or purchase of the future office, Carty said.
Also presented to the CIF-SS Council on Tuesday was a future proposal that would limit football playoff eligibility to teams that have a winning percentage of .300 or better. Teams with records of 2-8 and lower have been included in CIF-SS football playoffs. That proposal, unless withdrawn, would go to a vote at the CIF-SS Council’s session in April session.