With a majority vote of 193-140, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association member schools decided on Friday to approve a new statewide tournament proposal that will drastically change the look and operation of the MIAA state tournament each season.
The vote took place among athletic directors of all member schools at Assabet Valley Regional Technical School.
The new tournament structure, which will be implemented in the Fall of 2021, will eliminate the current sectional tournament format, and replace it with a statewide tournament bracket based on divisions, similar to the structure of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.
St. Mary’s athletic director Jeff Newhall, who sits on the Tournament Management Committee (TMC) that proposed the new format, believes this new statewide tournament will be beneficial in many aspects.
“I’ve gotten to go around the state and talk to a lot of people, and I understand why some schools have misgivings about the new system,” said Newhall. “But at the end of the day, if you’re going to call it a state tournament, then every team in the state should have the same path to a title. We’ve seen way too many uneven brackets over the years, where the best four or five teams are all in one part of the state beating up on each other, while a team from another part of the state coasts to the championship game. If you’re going to call it a state tournament, it should be the same tournament for the entire state.”
The new tournament format will call for the top 32 teams in each division to qualify for the postseason based on power ranking. Teams that achieve a regular season record above .500, but are outside the top 32, will also qualify for the postseason.
This process of power ranking schools will be handled by MaxPreps, which will begin to seed schools via a power-ranking system and alignments starting in the Fall of 2020. Division alignments will be re-established by sports committees using the TMC’s alignment guidelines, but it is yet to be seen if divisions will actually be significantly realigned. Sports committees will be given the opportunity to request divisional expansion or alternatives to alignment methods to the TMC.
“I think the committee did a good job (Friday) of showing that the MaxPreps aspect of this was going to happen no matter what,” said Newhall. “I personally am in favor of the power ranking system. It goes back to fairness and continuity. Teams out west rank their teams in one fashion, while Central Mass. teams are ranked in a slightly different way, and teams in Eastern Mass. rank based on winning percentage. It needs to be a uniform system.
“To rank someone simply off of their record when there’s so much variance in strengths of schedule and caliber of opponents simply doesn’t make sense,” Newhall added.
Shaun Hart (Burlington), Johanna DiCarlo (Westboro), Derek Folan (Canton), Pam Gould (Sandwich) and Jim O’Leary (St. John’s Prep), all members of the TMC, sat at a table on stage during Friday’s assembly. MIAA Associate Director Sherry Bryant, MIAA President Jeff Granatino and MIAA Executive Director Bill Gaine also sat at the table.
Following a rundown of the proposal from Bryant, the group took questions from the roughly 330 MIAA membership representatives in the auditorium for a little over 40 minutes.
The TMC added that there will be an informational session with MaxPreps to answer additional questions about the power ranking process in March. MaxPreps and questions regarding the system were not up for discussion at Friday’s meeting.