CdM out of playoff picture

Corona del Mar High will not play in this year’s CIF football playoffs after losing a coin flip to Irvine.

Pacific Coast League athletic directors met Tuesday to determine which school would be the third-place team in league, and to determine the No. 1 representative for the playoffs.

Laguna Hills would be the top representative and would share the Pacific Coast League title with University, CdM Athletic Director Paul Orris said Wednesday.

The decision came days before the end of the regular season. Laguna Hills (5-2, 2-0 in league) will play Irvine (7-1, 1-1) Friday, and University (8-0, 2-0) will play Beckman (5-4, 0-3).

The aforementioned scenario posed by the athletic directors assumes that Beckman and Irvine will both lose Friday night. CdM would not get an at-large berth because it does not have a .500 record. The Sea Kings are 3-6, 1-2.

Administrators did not think it would be prudent to wait until after Friday’s games for the coin flips for several reasons.

“We considered all the options and felt that waiting until after all the games were played was going to be more difficult to make all these decisions, and so we went ahead and did this,” Orris said.

Waiting until Friday night also would have resulted in Corona del Mar practicing for a week without a game plan for a specific opponent.

“We flipped these coins just to cover all circumstances,” Orris said. “Certainly I don’t think fair is appropriate to even mention. Certainly there were unusual circumstances this year necessitated by all the fires and closing of schools and practices.

“Is this an ideal situation? No. Ask any coach, and they want to determine things on the field, and not by a coin flip.”

The entire need to flip the coins arose when league officials decided to cancel Week 8 games because of the Southern California wildfires. However, only the Pacific Coast and Trinity leagues elected not to make up the missed games. The Pacific Coast League cited safety concerns as the reason for scratching the games.

CdM coach Dick Freeman released the results Tuesday in a team meeting.

“It’s absolutely devastating. That’s the only way I can describe it,” said senior quarterback Hunter Alder. “When you’re a senior, and you know that you’re going into your last game, you’re at least prepared for it. When they told us on Tuesday, I was shocked. I didn’t know what to do.”

Alder’s last game was Oct. 19, against Laguna Hills, since he didn’t play in the Nov. 1 game against University.

“I truly think if we would have played Irvine, that we would have beaten them,” Alder said. “It wasn’t fair. Every other league [except Trinity] in Orange County made up their games, and for our league not to do it, it just didn’t seem fair.”

Alder disagreed with administrators who were worried about the safety of playing three games in two weeks, which is what would have happened if the games had been rescheduled.

“Yes, it would have been hard,” Alder said. “No one would have been in shape for the game, but it would have been the right thing to do.”

The team started offseason conditioning Wednesday, and multi-sport athletes moved on.

Alder is focusing on basketball, while junior receiver Noah Molnar started practicing with the lacrosse team.

“It’s pretty sad,” Molnar said. “It’s sad most of all for the seniors. I think it’s weird for them not ending it in a definitive way. It’s not like they lost a game and knew it was over. It was kind of lingering.”

SORAYA NADIA McDONALD may be reached at (714) 966-4613 or at [email protected].