The high school fall sports season is reaching its climax, with a pair of sports finishing off the regular season on Tuesday, while the rest will follow in the ensuing weeks.
Many of the squads with their eyes on the postseason gathered at the weekly Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table Press Luncheon at Harry’s Plaza Cafe on Monday.
High School Volleyball, Flag Football Playoffs Pairings Coming Soon
With the conclusion of the girls volleyball and flag football regular seasons on Thursday, the local teams in CIF-SS playoff position will learn their divisions and first-round matchups later in the week.
The CIF-SS flag football brackets will be released on the CIF-SS website on Friday at 2 p.m., while the girls volleyball brackets will be revealed on Saturday at 9 a.m.
The local teams will not know which divisions they are competing in until the brackets are released, a change in different years to promote competitive equity and base the division pairings on the team’s success during the regular season rather than historically.
While it is not set in stone, it seems as though San Marcos and Dos Pueblos are destined for the CIF-SS Division 1 girls flag football playoffs.
The two rivals currently sit tied atop the Channel League standings. In the most recent poll, the Chargers are the No. 5 team and the Royals sit at No. 7 in the CIF-SS power rankings.
“We’re super excited about where we are as a team,” Dos Pueblos head coach Doug Caines said. “Hopefully we’ll be ready to host a (playoffs) game out at DP.”
In girls volleyball, Channel League champion San Marcos is the highest-ranked local team at No. 23 in CIF-SS. This ranking could land the Royals a tough pairing in the opening rounds of their playoff run.
“We’ll see what happens when the playoff draw comes out,” San Marcos athletic director Aaron Solis said. “A lot is going to depend on if Division 1 is going to be eight teams or 16 teams. I’m hoping it’s 16 teams because that means we’ll be one of the top 16 seeds in Division 2, but we’ll see how this whole ranking thing goes.”
Santa Barbara High (3rd in Channel League), Laguna Blanca (1st in Frontier League) and Bishop Diego (1st in Tri-Valley League) will all be competing in the CIF-SS girls volleyball playoffs in lower divisions than San Marcos.
“It’s going to be very exciting to see where everything shakes out and where we end up, but we are excited for the postseason,” Dons head coach Kristin Hempy said.
SBCC Football Fights Through Adversity
The Vaqueros have struggled mightily throughout their 2025 campaign, losing all six of their games and starting the SCFA North Conference schedule at 0-3.
Along the way, SBCC has been outscored by a margin of 169-28 while playing in one of the toughest city college football conferences in the nation. Despite this, SBCC head coach Craig Moropoulos remains positive about his team’s progression.
“When you’re playing at the level of competition we do, which is, in my opinion, the best in the country at the community college level, it’d be easy to feel sorry for yourself and focus on the negatives. But I’m not gonna do that,” Moropoulos said.
“What I told our guys on Saturday is that W’s don’t always reflect the score. You can win and still lose a game. I hate to say that, because we all want to win. We all want to be successful. We want to have more points than our opponents. I get that, but when we’re at our stage with our young guys, I just said, ‘Hey, we’re going to play as hard as we can for 60, not 59, not 58, for 60 minutes.’”
The Vaqueros are coming off a 40-7 loss to Moorpark, and although that’s not the ultimate result Moropoulos is looking for, he was encouraged about his team.
“We played a Moorpark team that was hungry to beat us. We’d beat them four years in a row, but the fact of the matter is they played better than us, and they won the game,” Moropoulos said.
“I’m looking for certain things like our defense stepping it up, which they did. They’ve got a couple of turnovers, gave us the ball, we couldn’t punch it in… Don’t get me wrong, we’re 0-6. I’m not hiding from that, but W’s can be in a lot of different ways.”
SBCC will have another tall task ahead of itself this Saturday as it hosts highly-ranked Mt. San Antonio College at 6 p.m. at La Playa Stadium.
“It’ll be a heck of a challenge for us, but we’re going to be there, and we’re going to give it everything we got,” Moropoulos said.
Student-Athletes in Attendance
Dos Pueblos Flag Football: Kindah Ahmad-Reda, Brooklyn Hedricks
Dos Pueblos Cross Country: Cate Bishop, Linus Martin, Owen Abbott
Dos Pueblos Football: Brady Walbridge, Ivan Velez
SBCC Football: Dean Davis, Jayden Cleary
San Marcos Girls Volleyball: Lila Westmacott, Jordan Schmoeller, Kelsey Rowe
Santa Barbara High Girls Tennis: Nicole Buist, Violet Marr, Kana Wolf
San Marcos Football: Isaac Murillo, Max Campbell, Logan Hale
San Marcos Flag Football: Peyton Sperling, Autumn Johnson, Sutera Raring
Santa Barbara High Girls Volleyball: Lauren McFadden, Peyton Herlihy
Santa Barbara High Football: Reid Miller, Benji Starlin
Santa Barbara High Flag Football: Lylee Harris, Maria Cordoza
San Marcos Cross Country: Wyatt Degner, Elsie Tuttle, Autumn Richardson
Carpinteria High Football: Isaac Neri, Peter Casas
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