Normally, I prefer to be a black-and-white kind of guy.
You have rules and procedures, then you follow them. That way you save yourself from headaches later.
It’s one of the things we are critical of area coaches. Sometimes, they struggle to make tough decisions. Often, they just decide not to make a choice.
It happens often with all-league teams. You know, co-players of the year, or all-league teams that contain six more players than can fit on a field at one time.
That’s why I like to hold firm to the format of picking our All-Region teams and players of the year.
The format for our All-Region football team has been, and remains, 24 players. The 24 best players in the region. Not 25, 26 or 27 when we have a tough time picking that last spot.
And on more than one occasion, I’ve been asked to consider having co-players of the year for the sport.
And my answer has been firm — no. Make the tough choice.
Well, most of the time.
This is the 14th year that we’ve been selecting All-Region teams for The Columbian. And three times we had co-players of the year in a sport.
That’s three out of more than 270 All-Region teams we’ve selected. Two of those co-players of the year were members of the same doubles team in tennis. The other were wrestlers … who were identical twins.
So for every rule, there should be room for an exception.
We ran across another this fall.
The past couple of years we’ve asked for the input of fans and coaches to help us select the All-Region teams.
So we put together a ballot and send it out to fans and coaches. But how do we determine which players are on the ballot?
Our solution for that is a player must have been a first-team all-league selection to earn a spot on the ballot.
So when I put together this fall’s ballots, I grabbed all the first-team all-leaguers and put them on the ballots.
When Columbian preps reporter Paul Valencia got the ballot I sent to Columbian staffers for football, he asked why Mountain View’s Preston Jones was not on the ballot.
Easy, I replied. He wasn’t a first-team all-league pick.
“So our leading rusher in the region isn’t on the All-Region ballot?” Paul asked.
It was a good question.
Jones was the top rusher in the region, gaining 1,351 yards. And while other players got 10, 11 or 12 games, including playoffs, Jones accumulated his total in just eight games.
And yet, Jones outgained them all.
While I was pondering that stat, a couple of area coaches also wondered why Jones was not on the ballot.
That’s when we figured that we may have missed something.
The proper course of action would have been to catch this before the ballots were released. Just put Jones on the ballot even though he was a second-team pick. Then let him go through the process.
But with the ballots already being released, that ship had sailed. So we needed to find another solution.
So we had two choices.
One, we could leave Jones off the team, saying “bummer. He was a second-team pick. Those are the rules.”
Or we could find a fair way to get him on the team.
We felt he was deserving of a spot on our team. And our solution was to break from our form and create a 25th spot on our All-Region team.
That way Jones is on the team, but no player who made the team through the regular selection process would be bumped from the team.
It just felt like the right thing to do.
Now, the flip side to all this is we open ourselves up to inquiries from people saying “Well, why didn’t you do that for my kid?”
Because this was the exception. It was the first time in more than 270 teams selected that we broke from our predetermined number of athletes to be selected to the team.
It may not be the last time we do that. But we certainly aren’t going to do every time.
