One of the newcomers to this week’s state rankings is 2019 CIF L.A. City Section Open Division winner El Camino Real of Woodland Hills, which had pitcher Jillian Kelly at the time and still has her as a dominating pitcher this spring. Photo: Twitter.com.
There’s a new No. 1 team, but it’s a team that knows all about being in that position as Norco gets the nod this week. A head-to-head win that the Cougars have over Huntington Beach comes into play after previous No. 1 Villa Park lost to Los Alamitos. Westlake and Mater Dei Catholic also move into the top five. Historically, however, the biggest news of the week may be the CIF announcing that the first-ever Southern California regional playoffs in softball will be happening in June.
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Note About CIF Regional Playoffs: It was announced last week that the CIF will be hosting a one-week Southern California regional playoff for softball that will be held from June 19 to June 26. This was the year, remember, that the CIF was going to have both NorCal and SoCal regionals in softball and then CIF state finals in several divisions. There has never been any softball playoffs in California ever beyond the CIF section levels so even though NorCal regional playoffs aren’t happening, this is still a big deal that SoCal regionals are taking place. We don’t know, of course, which schools will opt out of going on beyond the section playoffs and we don’t know how many travel ball players will be skipping out on the rest of this strange, later than usual high school season to concentrate only on those travel ball events. As with everything else COVID-19 related, we will just have to wait and see. For the record, the CIF sections that will be advancing teams into the SoCal regional playoffs will be the Southern, San Diego, L.A. City and Central Sections. In normal years, Central Section teams can be placed by the CIF into either the NorCal or SoCal regional brackets.
