NJSIAA eliminates ToC beginning with 2022-23 school year
The Tournament of Champions is no more.
The NJSIAA’s Executive Committee voted 33-4 with two abstentions Wednesday in favor eliminating the ToC, which allows some high school sports to play down to one champion, beginning with the 2022-23 school year.
The ToC began in 1980 with girls tennis and over the years added tournaments for boys and girls basketball, boys and girls lacrosse, softball, field hockey, boys tennis, girls volleyball and bowling.
The tournaments, which consist of group champions across the state being seeded into a single bracket, will continue during the upcoming winter and spring seasons and then cease to exist next fall.
The move follows the NJSIAA’s decision in June to reduce the length of all sports seasons starting next school year. No teams will be permitted to play more than 24 regular-season games and the winter season, which historically has been the longest, will end in the first week of March as opposed to late March.
Eliminating the ToC is a natural step because it cuts into the regular season and benefits only a few schools who feature powerhouse programs.
Boys basketball has not had a public school champion since Camden in 2000. Boys lacrosse has crowned only six different champions since starting a ToC in 2004, and girls lacrosse
has had only three champions in 14 years.
In Mercer County, four programs have won a ToC: Trenton girls basketball in 2002, Trenton Catholic boys basketball in 2010, Trenton Catholic girls basketball in 2011 and Steinert
softball in 2018.
NJSIAA Executive Director Colleen Maguire has argued that no ToC means the regular season can be extended one week longer in some sports and afford more teams a chance to play extra games.
“As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and start to look toward the future, we feel now is the appropriate time to eliminate these tournaments and strive for more consistent and normalized seasons across all sports,”
Maguire said last month during the initial proposal.
Currently, New Jersey is the only state that plays down to a single champion in any sport. That won’t be the case anymore next year.