WOBURN — Coaches and athletic directors from around the north met Monday night at Woburn High School to discuss the proposed changes to the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association state tournament system.
The new proposal, which is slated to be voted on by the MIAA’s nearly 400 member schools later this month, would eliminate sectional brackets in favor of a statewide-based tournament system.
Monday’s informational meeting, led by Tournament Management Committee member Shaun Hart, the athletic director at Burlington High, was a chance for coaches and athletic directors to be presented with and discuss the new changes the MIAA has been putting together for several years now.
“We’ve taken a lot of feedback from a lot of different people (over the past two years),” Hart, also a former athletic director at Revere High, said. “Is it perfect? No. Absolutely not. I’m not going to stand here and tell you that this is perfect. We know that going in we don’t have every answer because we’ve never done it.
“Ultimately we’ve brought it to every athletic director in the state and we’ve gotten pages of feedback,” Hart added. “What we’ve done is we’ve taken pages of feedback and rebuilt it into where this is the 50 or 60th version of this.”
Ultimately, the statewide tournament will look a lot like the NCAA college basketball tournament. Most sports will be divided into five divisions with the top 32 teams from each division qualifying for the tournament. The top-four seeded teams will be placed at the top of four brackets while the rest of the bracket will be filled with the remaining teams according to the power rankings.
Qualifying rules, including the Sullivan rule, would be eliminated. However, any team over .500 on the year would qualify for the tournament. If more than 32 teams qualify under that criteria, preliminary games will be played until only 32 teams remain for the first round of the state tournament.
Sports like Swimming, track and wrestling that already have statewide systems will not be changed.
“There are no more qualifiers for the tournament,” Hart said. “The Sullivan rule is gone, League champion is gone and second place in the league is gone. The rationale behind those being gone is, once you power seed all of those 32 teams in that division, those teams won’t need those qualifiers. Smaller schools playing in bigger leagues will get power seeded in their division.
“If you’re 10-10 and not power seeded into the top 32, the seeding would continue down for all the .500 teams,” Hart said. “You would have 32 guaranteed and 33, 34, 35, etc. would continue down the road for .500 teams to play in preliminary round games.”
Another big change is that top seeds will host games up until the round of eight. This brings concerns of increased travel times for teams who play road games. One plan to help ease this is possible revenue streams to pay for traveling costs.
“We are trying to build in a ticket revenue stream that will pay both the home school and the away school so that they can both be reimbursed for bus costs to send teams to games,” Hart said.
The statewide tournament proposal, which would go into effect for the 2021-2022 season if approved, will be voted on at a February 28 meeting at Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School (9 a.m.). Of the nearly 400 schools eligible to vote, a simple majority is needed to pass the proposal.
