Abbreviation CIF Type NPO Purpose Athletic/Educational Founded 1914 | Formation 1914 Legal status Association Region served California Staff 14 | |
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Headquarters Sacramento, California, United States Motto "Dedicated to developing student-athletes of character" Similar CIF Southern Section, Sac‑Joaquin Section, CIF Central Coast Section, Mt San Antonio College, Flintridge Preparatory School Profiles | ||
The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) is the governing body for high school sports in the state of California. CIF membership includes both public and private high schools. Unlike most other state organizations, it does not have a single, statewide championships for all sports; instead, for some sports, the CIF's 10 Sections each have their own championships.
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Six schools near the state border are members of adjacent state's associations. San Pasqual Valley High School is part of the Arizona Interscholastic Association. Coleville High School, Needles High School, North Tahoe High School, South Tahoe High School and Truckee High School are part of the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association.
History
As early as 1891, schools around the San Francisco Bay Area began competing against each other in football organized by the Amateur Academic Athletic Association. Other boys sports were added starting 1894, organized by the Academic Athletic League. While teams represented the schools by name, there was no affiliation with the school administration.
The CIF was founded in Los Angeles in 1914 by a group of area school principals. It was founded in order to standardize rules and team structures between schools; it was also intended to prevent abuses such as "school shopping" by athletes and teams fielding players over high school age. Other school principals voluntarily entered into the program, and by 1917, the organization was established statewide.
In 2005, CIF began requiring that all student athletes sign a pledge not to take any steroids or face suspension or expulsion. This action was the first of its kind from a statewide high school athletics association in the United States.
Championships
CIF holds state and regional championships in:
CIF also hosts a State Cheerleading Championship in conjunction with the football championship.
There are also Northern California championships in tennis and girls' wrestling, and Southern California championships in boys' volleyball, girls' wrestling, and boys' and girls' soccer. Starting in 2018, a Northern California championship will be added for boys' and girls' soccer.
Individual CIF sections also conduct championships in other sports, including:
In sports where a school has separate boys' and girls' teams, girls are not allowed on boys' teams, and boys are not allowed on girls' teams. (In sports such as baseball that do not have girls' teams, girls are allowed to play; on the other hand, in sports such as softball that do not have boys' teams, in most cases boys are not allowed to play.)
Awards
CIF offers various awards to its participants:
Sections
The state is broken up into ten administrative sections. These sections are:
Each section except for San Francisco is further subdivided into leagues. The Northern Section is divided into three conferences which in turn are divided into leagues. The Southern Section is the largest by both membership and geography, covering just under one-third of the state's total area and almost half of the population base. The Southern section includes private schools in the LAUSD service area, whether inside or outside the city of Los Angeles, and the Central Coast and North Coast sections also include private schools in the cities of San Francisco and Oakland respectively. The three "City Sections" are operated by and limited to the corresponding public school systems.
The sections also serve as the qualifying entities for regional and state competitions, and may organize championships in sports not contested statewide, such as badminton, baseball, field hockey, gymnastics, lacrosse, skiing and snowboarding, soccer, softball, and water polo.
Federated Council
The organization's supreme governing body is the Federated Council. This council consists of one representative from each section, a representative from the California Department of Education, representatives from all bodies recognized as Allied Organizations by the CIF, the Council President, the President-Elect, and the immediate past President. Each representative is elected to a term of two years. The Council meets three times per year.
Allied Organizations
The following groups are considered Allied Organization by CIF: