The vote is in: Statewide tournament passes.

The member schools of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association descended upon Assabet Valley Tech in Marlborough for an important vote this morning, and their decision is in.

The proposal to create statewide tournaments in all high school sports passed by a 193-140 margin. That vote indicates that representatives of 37 of the MIAA's member schools did not attend, or roughly 12 percent. Frankly, that's unpardonable. For a vote that will create such sweeping change, any school that had a stake in it -- and I'd have to believe all of them did -- should have sent someone to cast a vote.

Readers of this blog know that I objected to the statewide tournaments, for reasons that I shall repeat below. But I also understand that the time has come to put aside disagreements and make the most of it. There are other issues that will need to be addressed in the weeks and months ahead, but in the meantime, it's time to wrap our heads around what's coming and to figure out how to make it work.

Anyway, here's what is coming beginning in the fall of 2021:

** Most sports will be ordered in five enrollment-based decisions (some fewer depending upon number of participating schools, and there are still provisions for Super Eight tournament). There will be no sectional alignments or championships.

** 32 teams in each division will qualify for the tournament according to a power-ranking system developed by MaxPreps, a national clearinghouse for high school sports information. Teams that finish with records of .500 or better that do not meet MaxPreps' criteria will still qualify and will be seeded in a preliminary, play-in round.

** Higher-seeded teams will have home-site advantage until the Round of Eight, when neutral sites will kick in.

The push for a statewide tournament began in 2016, as a means of mitigating inequities in the current format that has been in place for almost a half-century. Because 247 of the MIAA's 380 member schools are located within the North and South sections, it might take a North or South school five playoff games to reach the state semifinals, while in the more sparsely populated Central or West sections, it could be as few as two or three games according to the number of qualifiers.

The other alternative would have been a sweeping realignment of the current four sections, with many more schools being removed from the two eastern sections and assigned to the Central and West sections in an effort to balance the membership.

Several coaches to whom I've spoken, both privately and on the record, said they objected to the losses of the sectional championships because they provided reachable goals for their teams. While a state championship is the ultimate goal, sectional championships provided validation to programs that were building toward being able to compete at the highest level.

I've also heard (and share) concerns about travel to far-flung venues within the tournament schedule. Although the option is available to find neutral sites, I suspect those will be last-minute announcements (just as they are now) and will wreak havoc with the travel plans of fans or parents.

And let's face it … it's already tough to go from where I live in southeastern Massachusetts to some North Shore venues or even sites along Route 3 on the South Shore because of the ridiculous rush-hour traffic that's met when it's time to head to tournament venues. As I noted in a previous post, it's very doubtful that parents will brave their rush hours to get home and then turn around and head out for a two-hour (or more) drive to a venue deep in western or central Massachusetts. Nor would I expect them to give permission to their children with driver's licenses to be out until midnight or later in transit from tournament sites.

In a nutshell, I believe attendance will suffer.

I've also heard that by eliminating the "state" basketball semifinals, the schools in eastern Massachusetts have sacrificed the use of the TD Garden in the future. Personally, I believe that's where the state finals should be, but I doubt the MIAA will be able to secure weekend dates in March.

But as Bill Belichick might say, "It is what it is." A decision has been made by roughly 50.8 percent of the MIAA's member schools, and now it's time to live with it.

I firmly believe that further discussion must be devoted to another decision that has already been made, the move to involve MaxPreps in seeding. I steadfastly object to any system that allows people to arbitrarily and secretly determine that a team that finishes 20-0 with the schedule it chose is unworthy of a top seed. I think that power seeding is contrary to the mission of high school sports, a means of artificially establishing "elite" programs based upon manipulatable math.

I also don't believe that truly good teams need any more help to compete in the tournament. If a team finished 13-7 but is regarded by the so-called experts as being better than eight teams with higher records, you may as well hand that team the trophy and save us all the travel expenses.

Prove it on the court. Save the power seedings for the big-money NCAA tournament.

There will be opportunities in the weeks ahead to express concern about the proprietary and secretive method MaxPreps will employ, and it's my fervent hope that the coaches that object to it as much as I do will make their voices heard through their athletic directors.

One last thought -- in 1991, the MIAA tried to tinker with the tournament format when it established an "open" basketball tournament, in which all schools were eligible to compete regardless of record. It was loosely based upon the Indiana model (although enrollment-based divisions still existed), and it was a noble effort -- but one that failed under its own largesse. Not only were all teams required to play their games at neutral sites, but also the preliminary rounds took forever. Thinking that an 0-20 team should not have to play a 20-0 team, the multiple play-in games forced top seeds to sit around and wait for more than a week before they played -- and many of them suffered from the long layoffs.

It was a disaster -- and the lesson it left behind should not be lost upon the MIAA. The association now has more than a year to figure out the logistics of these travel-dependent tournaments -- and at the top of the to-do list should be learning how to schedule playing dates and venues
that are firm and well-publicized in advance.

See you on the road, folks.