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| The DCU Center in Worcester, site of past MIAA basketball tournament championship games. |
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. And even if the schools reject the statewide tournament, there will still be sweeping changes to the tournament format that have already been approved by MIAA committees -- changes which many coaches feel have been shoved down their throats with little, if any, opportunity for them to offer their input.
The statewide tournament proposal is fairly simple.
Most sports would be reconfigured into five enrollment-based divisions (fewer divisions for some sports with lesser participation). Seedings would be done according to a proprietary system managed by MaxPreps, a national high school sports information clearinghouse. The top 32 teams in each division according to MaxPreps power seeding would qualify for the postseason, as well as teams with .500-or-better records that did not meet MaxPreps' criteria.Higher-seeded winners would retain home-court advantage until the Round of Eight, at which time the action would switch to neutral sites. There would be NO sectional championships as there are today.
What instantly comes to mind is an immediate impact upon the schools' travel budgets, as well as the likelihood that fan attendance from visiting teams would drop considerably without the early rounds being competed within the traditional sections.
Worst-case scenario
The possibility would exist that in the first round of a Division 2 tournament, a team from Nauset Regional High School in North Eastham (at the elbow of Cape Cod) would have to play a team from Pittsfield High School. According to Google Maps, the travel time between the two schools is 3 hours and 57 minutes under optimum conditions -- which are not likely to be found on a Tuesday night during the winter sports season. So what you're looking at is a departure from a school at around 1 p.m. and arrival back at that school at 1 a.m. -- yes, on a school night.
Some might say, "well, get a hotel room and stay over." Frankly, I'm not sure if too many schools want to add multiple hotel accommodations for athletes and coaches to their travel budgets, as well as sanctioning unexcused absences from school the next day for anything less than the most unavoidable circumstance.
More realistically, my feeling is that the worst inconvenience would be to fans or parents in the eastern part of the state having to make the early-evening drive west. Parents that get out of work around 4 p.m. and have to brave the ever-growing traffic congestion inside I-495 are not going to want to get back into their cars for a two-hour drive to a tournament venue, assuming there's even the most remote chance that they can make it in time. By having sectional competition, there are still some nasty drives (try getting anywhere down Route 3 after 4 p.m.), but they are more manageable.
The statewide tournament, it's believed here, would lessen fan interest and participation, not increase it.
So who was clamoring for it to begin with?
A quest for "fairness"
The MIAA's Tournament Management Committee undertook this challenge in 2016, reacting to the complaints of some that saw inequities in the current format. Most notable among those is that 247 of the MIAA's 380 member schools are located within the North and South sections, and thus, the number of qualifiers in those sections are greater than in the Central and West.
In some sports, it might take a North or South school five playoff games to reach the state semifinals, while in the Central or West sections, it could be as few as two or three games according to the number of qualifiers. Attempts have already been made to move some Eastern Mass. schools into the Central section to balance things off, but there are still significant inequities.
Also, because the Central and West sections are less-populated than the two sections in the east, there are far fewer schools that can compete in the higher-enrollment divisions.
I've long wondered why the MIAA didn't consider merging the Central and West sections, except for the fact that a four-section tournament works much better. So, it seems as if the only alternatives are to wipe the sectionals off the face of the earth, or to reconfigure them significantly -- and if the former fails to gain the member schools' approval, the latter is going to happen no matter what.
Some coaches have openly objected to the demise of sectional tournaments because they offer a measure of validation to programs that were successful enough to reach the top of their respective sectional brackets. One of the more influential voices in support of sectionals among coaches in this state is that of Kristen McDonnell, the current boys' basketball coach at Norwood High, whose Braintree High girls' teams won seven sectional championships over her 10 years as head coach.
“I still think there’s something positive and so great about having the local camaraderie,” McDonnell told the Boston Globe. “Having it be regionalized brings a certain competitiveness and community-building piece that I think you’re losing if you’re going to do it statewide.”
Many coaches to whom I've spoken in recent weeks agreed that sectional championships maintain regional fan interest at a high level and are worthy goals for their programs. And they don't want to lose the regional rivalries.
"It's a means of getting away from the support that you would have had from your fans -- especially the youth (basketball players), and I try to steer a lot of them to our games," said Foxboro High girls' basketball coach Lisa Downs, whose Warriors won a state title in 2018. "It's going to be next-to-impossible for the parents to follow us to some of these locations."
The MIAA has already decided that realignment will take place if the statewide tournament proposal fails, which would include shifting several schools from the two eastern sections to the Central, and a few Central schools to the West. One such possible realignment suggested by the Boston Globe involved the move to the Central section of Hockomock League schools King Philip, Mansfield, North Attleboro and Sharon (joining Franklin and Milford, which are already there) as well as nearby schools such as Walpole and Wellesley.
The MaxPreps issue
Perhaps of even more concerns to the coaches is the MIAA's apparent commitment to MaxPreps for its seeding of tournaments in all sports. Even coaches that are active in the state coaches association and who generally try to keep up with rule-change proposals say they were blindsided by the decision.
"We're all in the same boat," said Downs, noting that the MaxPreps issue was a hot topic at her recent league meeting. "Everyone has so many questions and there are just no answers right now."
MaxPreps can be a valuable resource for schedules, rosters and recent history of various high school sports nationwide. But the content is often inaccurate and incomplete. And because so much of it relies upon computer programs, inaccuracies often happen. It's not unusual to see games from other states showing up on local teams' schedules. Schools such as Mansfield and Canton, which share their names with several other communities across the country, occasionally find games from Texas, Ohio, Connecticut, Louisiana or other states showing up on their schedule pages.
Additionally, representatives from MaxPreps refuse to reveal their methodology for creating power seedings, making them impossible to duplicate by coaches or fans. Downs said that not being able to predict how seedings might be at season's end hinders her ability to either scout potential opponents herself, or assign others to do it.
Downs said she was also concerned about factors that might affect seedings, such as point differentials and the quality of league competition.
"If you look at our league in general," she said, "the (Hockomock League) Davenport had some pretty weak teams this year. Is that going to hurt us? And it's all out of our hands."
MaxPreps officials have scheduled a series of meetings through the MIAA in an effort to explain some of their procedures, but they have insisted that they will not reveal specifics about their methods for power rankings. And one way or another, there is no recourse for coaches that object to the intrusion of subjective opinion into the seeding process. It's a done deal.
"There's just so much ambiguity out there, and no one really knows how this is going to work," Downs said. "Had we had concrete, written details and we could refer to those and ask questions, it would have been a lot easier to swallow as this point."
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