Football: East Valley coach must miss first game

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The City Section holds a mandatory preseason meeting for football coaches in which every school must send a representative. Those that don’t are penalized, and the penalty is that the varsity head coach has to sit out the first game.

East Valley High, which is scheduled to play football for the first time in the eight-man division, didn’t send a representative to the meeting, so its head coach won’t be able to attend the season opener, though the school is appealing at Wednesday’s City Section rules committee meeting.

In other rules committee news, Los Angeles has dropped its junior varsity football program due to lack of participation.

Garfield has dropped girls’ golf and boys’ and girls’ water polo.

Update: East Valley has won its appeal and its coach will not have to miss the first game. The rules committee decided the school was in the process of getting a new athletic director and new assistant principal in charge of athletics, so there was a communication problem.

-- Eric Sondheimer