In their football season opener, St. Pius X-St. Matthias Academy, a Catholic school in Downey in L.A. county, lost 38-0. The next week, the school’s Warriors fell 56-14.

Six consecutive losses followed before St. Pius X-St. Matthias notched its first win. But after dropping their regular season finale, the Warriors, with a 1-9 record, thought their season was over.

Except it wasn’t.

Instead, the California Interscholastic Federation awarded St. Pius X-St. Matthias Academy a berth in the Division 8 football playoffs for the Southern Section. Given second life, the team ran off five consecutive victories and advanced to a state championship game.

How? The answer involves a California application of a controversial word: Equity.

Equity is the most powerful of the three values embodied in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. It’s also controversial, because it demands disrupting existing systems to achieve fair outcomes.

Equity now faces a fierce backlash, including the rollback of DEI programs in universities and workplaces. But the quest for equity is alive and advancing in high school sports.

Indeed, “competitive equity” has become a guiding principle of CIF, the school sports governing body, particularly in how it chooses teams for the playoffs.

Since California is too big to include all high schools in a single playoff tournament, CIF has organized teams into divisions. In each division, all schools are supposed to be on the same competitive level.

But they weren’t, until competitive equity.

Why not? Because divisions were based on factors other than team performance. For decades, divisions were based on school enrollment. But that wasn’t a good proxy for sports excellence. Smaller private schools with wealthy boosters could build programs stronger than those of budget-stretched public schools.

In the 2010s, CIF officials concluded that the best way to make division playoffs fair was to use a rankings system. This “competitive equity” system ranks teams at the end of each season and places them in divisions with teams of similar rankings. This means that each year, different schools end up in different divisions. The playoffs often produce surprises.

None more surprising than St. Pius X-St. Matthias.

The team was a playoff contender because the competitive equity rankings count not just wins and losses, but strength of schedule. Nine of the 10 teams the Warriors played qualified for the playoffs.

But the Warriors had to be lucky. When the CIF creates a division, it first includes all the automatic playoff qualifiers — league champions. It then uses competitive equity rankings to add teams with records of .500 or better. But in Division 8, there weren’t enough at-large teams with .500-or-better records to fill the 16-team field. So, St. Pius X-Matthias got a spot.

In the playoffs, the Warriors raised their game and won four in a row to take the Southern Section championship.

In the regional final, they played St. Augustine, which had lost all 10 regular season games, but won a playoff spot under competitive equity.

A regional final between two teams with a combined record of 1-19 drew national attention. “I don’t make the rules, I just follow them. They want competitive equity,” Warriors coach Devah Thomas said.

The Warriors’ run ended with a state championship game loss to the 12-2 Sonora High Wildcats from Tuolumne County. But competitive equity’s winning streak continues. This school year, the CIF Southern Section extended competitive equity beyond football and basketball to playoffs in all sports.

The critics didn’t complain. Why not? Maybe that’s because this is sports, where equity creates entertaining games, rather than human resources edicts. Or maybe it’s easier to see in the Warriors’ season what equity was supposed to do all along: give people who faced tougher opposition a fair chance to be champions.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.