MIAA approves statewide tourney structure
MARLBORO – Tournament Management Committee chairman Jim O’Leary wasn’t looking to take a victory lap around Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School Friday morning.
Sure, he was happy that the statewide tournament proposal created by his committee passed with a vote of 193-140. But he was more pleased with the way the process played out in the two years since the TMC was given a mandate by the MIAA Board of Directors to come up with a more equitable postseason plan.
“I’m really not happy or sad right now,” O’Leary said. “I’m grateful for the work that all the people on our committee put in. I’m grateful for the people who listened to us and even grateful to those who opposed the plan, but came to listen to it. It’s a testament to the way that the association should work.
“We have a lot of work to do now. Is this going to look the same two years from now? It’s not going to, but we are going to gather all the information and do the best that we can.”
The new statewide proposal will go into play for the start of the 2021-2022 fall seasons. Sectional tournaments will be replaced by divisions in which qualifying teams will be seeded by MaxPreps. Under the new format, the top 32 teams in each division would qualify based on the MaxPreps rankings, but teams which aren’t among those 32, but finish above .500 would also qualify.
“I think this is a good model, we can now establish true state champions,” said Lowell athletic director David Lezenski, a member of the TMC. “Are there pieces of it that need to be tweaked? Yes and I think it will happen as we go on. No plan is etched in stone, but I think this is moving toward a good statewide plan.”
In this year’s Division 1 girls basketball tournament, the North has 16 teams, the South has 15, while Central (8) and Western Mass (5) have fewer teams in the field.
A major point of the statewide proposal was that schools would be playing schools of similar size, something which isn’t necessarily happening today.
In football, the latest realignment by the MIAA Football Committee three years ago resulted in a pair of Division 1-sized schools from Central and Western Mass. being placed in Div. 3. Not surprisingly, St. John’s of Shrewsbury (2017) and Springfield Central (2018 and 2019) went on to capture Div. 3 state titles by defeating teams with less than half their enrollment.
“The fact that we played Springfield Central, a school with more than 2,000 kids as opposed to Tewksbury, which is right at 842, matters a great deal to us,” said Tewksbury athletic director Ron Drouin, whose football team lost to Springfield Central in 2018. “All we want is a fair fight, and this passing gives it to us. We’re just looking for a level playing field, not just for football, but for all of our programs.”
Another selling point is that going to a statewide format can potentially reduce the possibility of seeing a league foe early in the tournament. In Div. 1 South boys basketball, three of the four quarterfinal matchups pit two teams from the same league (Newton NorthNeedham, BC High-Catholic Memorial and Mansfield-Attleboro).
“After reading about all this stuff and going to presentations for the past two years, I think that for the Catholic Conference, it could increase the number of the teams from our league that get into the tournament,” Xaverian athletic director Ted Currle said. “You wouldn’t have to face league opponents in the tournament every year just to get out of your section.”
With 42% of voters against the proposal, there is clearly a level of consternation. While some talked about the potential for longer bus ride for opening round contests, more schools expressed a concern about MaxPreps. There is uncertainty about turning over tournament seeding to a computer system.
“Going to MaxPreps next year is a huge change and I just don’t know,” said Dedham athletic director Steve Traister. “I’d like to see what the real alignments would have looked like, let’s get some information out on how things would have fallen. I just felt the vote was a little too quick for me with the uncertainty of it.”