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Paul Valencia: Planting seed for solution to state basketball tourneys

By Paul Valencia, Columbian High School Sports Reporter
Published: March 6, 2015, 12:00am

The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association should change its logo to a piñata.

Everyone loves taking a swing at the organization — especially this time of year.

If you read the letter from the coaches association, if you “hear” the chatter on Twitter, if you lend your ear to us evil-doers in the media, the WIAA has ruined everything. Not just the state basketball tournaments, but everything in the world.

(Take that as a compliment, WIAA. You have more power than you ever realized!)

Tim Martinez noted in his Monday column that everyone seems to complain about the regional round of the state basketball tournaments, but no one seems to have a solution.

Well, the solution, according to “everyone,” is simple: Return to a 16-team, double-elimination tournament, with all 16 teams in one facility. Of course, “everyone” doesn’t have to pay for it. But that’s beside the point.

“If we could have kept it the way it was, we would have,” said Mike Colbrese, the WIAA’s executive director. “That’s the bottom line.”

(By the way, the coaches association and the WIAA sent out releases this week detailing their positions. Not going to re-hash everything here.)

For sake of argument, though, let’s say the 16-team, double-elimination tournament is not back any time soon.

Here is one man’s solution to improving the round of 16:

Once the 16 teams have qualified to state, do away with the regional stuff. Stop worrying about travel. Use a computer to rank all 16 teams. Then seed the games appropriately. (For sake of this exercise, let’s go with the popular Score Czar’s system.)

No. 16 travels to No. 1, No. 15 travels to No. 2, etc., for the first round of state. The winners then go to the one-site tournament for the elite eight. (If we insist on not having teams play home games, then have the games in the better’s seed’s county. After all, it seemed weird last week that Union, 21-1 and a top seed, had to travel farther than its opponent for regionals. Didn’t seem very regional to Union.)

We seem to have no problem with football and soccer teams traveling to home sites. Those sports don’t go to neutral venues until the semifinals.

This seeding format would do away with two “average” teams playing each other for the right to go to the Tacoma Dome. Or worse, two incredible teams playing each other, with one guaranteed to be done. We can all agree that Mark Morris, Clarkson, Lynden, and Sammamish are all pretty good, perhaps among the top six teams in 2A boys. Well, those four played each other in the regional round. Crazy.

There would be years when a Vancouver school would have to travel to Spokane for a first-round game, but there is a solution to that: Win more games. Of the 16 teams in the playoffs, half will earn home games. Simple.

The key here is whatever computer system is used, it is only used to seed the games. The 16 teams still earn their way to the tournament on the basketball court.

(To get an idea of what the brackets would have looked like last week using the Score Czar’s rankings, go to our high school sports blog at 360preps.com.)

Hey, I would prefer the old 16-team system, too. But dealing with reality — the costs of the facilities for eight days instead of three as well as the fact that attendance was steadily falling — if the round of 16 has to be single elimination, let’s seed the games and reward the top teams.

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Columbian High School Sports Reporter