Schools to be graded for postseason
| Wednesday, Jan 27 2010 10:44 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Jan 27 2010 10:44 PM
The Central Section has completed a "180-degree" change in the way high school teams compete in playoffs, thanks to a vote of the section's board of managers Wednesday morning in Porterville.
Starting this fall, each sport at each school will be evaluated for competitiveness on an individual basis. Programs that have performed well in the two-year grading period will be moved into higher playoff divisions; struggling programs may be dropped.
Each division also will have a minimum of 13 teams -- currently, most Division I sports have 11.
In football, Visalia-El Diamante, Tulare Union and Fresno-Edison, which have won the past three Division II championships, will be moved to D-I.
The vote passed in a 31-4 landslide, with only the representatives from the East Yosemite League, which includes Tulare Union and the Delano schools, and the Central Sequoia League dissenting.
"I was surprised at how lopsided it was," section commissioner Jim Crichlow said. "That caught me off guard."
Mathematically speaking, the system is fair: Each team is awarded points for league placement, playoff seeding and playoff results over the previous two school years (in this year's case, the seasons in question are 2007-08 and 2008-09). Every two years, the points will be tallied again, with the best and worst teams moving like European pro soccer teams up and down into new divisions.
No school will move more than one division at a time, and schools have the option of appealing the section's decision. The deadline for doing so this year is Feb. 15.
The current playoff system places teams based partly on enrollment and partly on the entire athletic program's success. Before that, playoff brackets were pre-determined based on league finish.
"The section has never been set up to where we've put our teams in playoffs on competitive equity," Crichlow said. "It's been a 180-degree circle from pre-determined brackets to now a wide-open equity of competition."
It means that Golden Valley boys soccer, which has been to the past two Division III section finals and is ranked No. 34 in the nation this year, will step up to Division II next year.
"I'm kind of glad we're moving up," Golden Valley soccer coach Troy Lynch said. "... It's good for them (the players). They really want to prove themselves."
It also means that teams from large-enrollement schools that have struggled will get a chance to compete against what Crichlow hopes will be a level playing field.
"This way now, they'll have an opportunity to win and say, 'Hey, yeah, I have a ring from high school where we won the section championship,'" he said.
The number of divisions in each sport will not change. Boys and girls golf will have schools move up and down divisions, while wrestling and track and field, which have two divisions and state-championship systems, will not change.
Teams that compete in a given division in the section will remain there for any state playoffs, even though the Central Section is the only of the CIF's 10 sections to use team-by-team competition-based placing. The Southern Section has divisions placed on the competitiveness of each league, but not each school or each team.
The exception is football, where the state's divisions for its bowl championships are determined purely on enrollment.
