Narbonne High's football team will spend a second straight season locked out of the playoffs after the CIF City Section Executive Committee voted 6-4 to deny the school's appeal to shorten its three-year postseason ban. The Harbor City program is barred from the playoffs through 2027 as punishment for rule violations tied to the 2024 season, when Narbonne won the City Open Division title and advanced to the state playoffs before investigators found the roster had been built through improper transfers.
A Program Still Paying for 2024
According to the Los Angeles Times, the sanctions stemmed directly from that title run, which was later stripped after a joint investigation by the Los Angeles Unified School District and the City Section. That investigation, detailed by Sports Illustrated, found that seven Narbonne players were declared ineligible after families used identical addresses, utility bills and meter numbers to fake residency, with several submitting fraudulent Student Housing Questionnaires claiming homelessness. In 2024, head coaches from rival Marine League programs Carson, Banning, Gardena and San Pedro forfeited all their scheduled games against Narbonne, a coordinated boycott meant to pressure LAUSD into launching a formal investigation, according to the seed report.
The fallout accelerated in September 2025, when self-proclaimed gambler and 1992 Narbonne graduate Brett Steigh admitted during a podcast interview that he had operated as a booster paying parents cash to transfer their kids to Narbonne, a confession reported by SFGATE. The ripple effects reached beyond LAUSD: Bishop Montgomery High School suspended or forfeited its 2025 season amid an internal investigation and CIF-SS violations, while more than 20 transfers had joined that program, per SFGATE's reporting.
Bylaw Violations and a Steep Penalty
In April 2025, the City Section formally cited Narbonne for violating CIF Bylaw 202, governing the submission of accurate information, and CIF Bylaw 510, which bars pre-enrollment contact and undue influence on prospective transfer students, according to the Los Angeles Times' earlier coverage of the ruling. Beyond the three-year football postseason ban, the City Section placed Narbonne's entire athletic department on probation across all sports through the 2027-28 school year, according to Patch. The forced forfeiture of Narbonne's 2024 games also had a ripple effect on the record books, retroactively restoring rival Birmingham High School's winning streak against City Section opponents to 49 consecutive games, per the Times.
This is not the first time Narbonne's football program has collapsed under scrutiny. In February 2020, longtime head coach Manuel Douglas resigned following an LAUSD investigation that led to a two-year postseason ban and the vacating of the 2018 City Section Open Division title, according to the Times' reporting at the time. Per the seed facts, the program's 2018 City Section championship trophy was also vacated, and school police later investigated the trophy's disappearance after it turned up discarded in a trash bin in 2021.
A New Principal Tries to Reset the Culture
Andrew Kasek became Narbonne's principal in 2025 and said LAUSD instructed him to end the program's cycle of scandal. Kasek said he was brought in specifically to fix the football program, and he has since approved all transfer paperwork himself and installed new transfer policies meant to close the loopholes exploited in 2024. He also told the former booster allegedly involved in the prior violations to stay away from the program entirely; Kasek said that booster nonetheless attended one game this year, sitting on the visitors' side.
Despite those changes, the appeal panel left the ban in place. He attributed the original violations to administrators' lack of athletic experience at the time, and he now has a new athletic director and a new head football coach in place. Narbonne received six transfers this year, several from the same area in Gardena, though the school maintains the new paperwork process has kept the roster clean. Kasek said flatly there will not be a third athletic scandal.
Committee Split on Trusting the Turnaround
Even so, City Section Executive Committee members said they remain concerned that Narbonne's culture could not change in such a short span, and the panel split 6-4 against shortening the ban. Some committee members countered that the current players and administration are new and should not be punished for past actions, but that view did not carry the vote. The committee did recommend that Kasek return in 2027 to make the case again for eliminating the ban's third year.
On the field, the rebuild has been rocky. Veteran coach Doug Bledsoe took over a roster gutted to just 30 varsity players after a mass exodus of athletes and coaching staff followed the initial 2025 penalty, according to the Times' August 2025 report. Narbonne finished that season 0-9, and entered the current campaign ranked 591st statewide in California per the Massey High School Football Rankings, as reported by On3. The program now has its own new head coach, Patrick Goodpaster, a first-year hire who also works as a lieutenant in the Gardena Police Department overseeing homicide investigations. Under Goodpaster, Narbonne sits at 1-2 through the early part of the 2026 season, still barred from any postseason it might otherwise earn.
