The Massachusetts high school sporting landscape is on the verge of a significant change, if a long discussed proposal is approved by the state’s governing body.
That could come as early as next month, as the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) is in the final stages of a massive overhaul to the state’s postseason tournament structure.
While planning has been in the works since late 2016, the MIAA’s Tournament Management Committee (TMC) was officially tasked with a comprehensive tournament protocol analysis in early 2017. Since that time, the TMC has methodically pieced together a new proposal, which it has rolled out on the MIAA website prior to a meeting with members of the media scheduled to be held in Franklin on Thursday.
In essence, the MIAA postseasons will no longer include sectional tournaments, if the proposal is passed by MIAA member institutions. Instead, all sports will move to a statewide tournament format. Divisions will be expanded, with most sports going to five divisions at the state level. That won’t be the case in every sport: tennis and field hockey are expecting a four-division system, with boys ice hockey looking at a three-division system. Enrollment is the determining factor and in general, Franklin County schools are expected to be slotted into Divisions 4 and 5, depending on the sport. Cooperative programs will be moved up one division higher than the enrollment of the largest school in the co-op.
Additionally, all tournament seeding and rankings will be handled by MaxPreps, the website founded in 2002 and owned by CBS Sports. The organization uses a formula to power rank teams across the country, and the Bay State will adopt their formula to set the brackets for their respective championships in all sports. That process would begin this fall for the 2020-2021 school year, though the statewide tournament proposal would not take effect until the 2021-2022 year.
The TMC requested that the MIAA Board of Directors support bringing its proposal to a full vote of the Assembly at a special meeting in February. If a vote doesn’t come then, it would likely take place at the regularly scheduled yearly Assembly meeting in April. Regardless, a simple majority of the MIAA’s nearly 400 member schools would be needed to approve the measure.
This proposal has massive implications at the local level. The Western Mass. tournaments as we know it, in every sport, would no longer exist. Thus, the Walker rating system would also become defunct, putting Franklin County schools and Western Mass. teams into the statewide pool using MaxPreps rankings.
“I get what the MIAA is proposing, the TMC, and why they’re doing it,” Athol athletic director Dan Bevis said. “It still hurts us out here in Western Mass. It’s difficult to have a voice at times with certain things at the state level. But what we do out here in the West is pretty good. A lot of people say the way we do things out West is the best in the state. We align our leagues accordingly, we implemented the Walker system. We do some things that most of the state is not doing. It’s unfortunate that some of it is going to go to waste.”
Turners Falls athletic director Adam Graves said that the loss of the Western Mass. tournaments will certainly be a hit for the area. His school has enjoyed success at the sectional level, as the softball team has won six consecutive WMass titles and 21 overall in the sport. Certainly, the team has been successful at the state level, but that isn’t necessarily the case for teams and schools throughout the region.
“Right now, I’m not a huge fan of it,” offered Graves of the statewide tournament proposal. “It takes away the Western Mass. championships, which is obviously huge in our area. Across the board, I think we’re going to lose a lot with that. In some sports, just to qualify for that and get in, that’s a huge thing. And the history that has come along with it… it’s really too bad.”
Greenfield athletic director Mike Kuchieski has been involved on the state level as the MIAA’s Western Mass. softball tournament director for the past four years. While he acknowledged the loss of sectional tournaments isn’t ideal, he’s optimistic that a statewide tournament system could work in the long run.
“It’s an eastern Mass. driven thing. We get that,” Kuchieski said of the proposal. “Out west, we have something good going. Why are we breaking something that works really well for us? That’s the biggest question mark out here. Look, the state tournament is fun. I’ve been in it (as a football coach in Florida). It’s a lot of fun. But like anything, it’s going to take some time to get use to.”
Let’s break down what this new tournament ranking system would look like. In the past, Western Mass. used the Walker, a three-prong system that weighed teams’ overall winning percentage, strength of schedule and record against other tournament teams. It’s generally been successful, especially compared to the counterpart method used in other parts of the state which largely seed brackets on record alone.
MaxPreps’ formula is not accessible to the public, though the organization does lay out some basic information about its method on its website (www.MaxPreps.com).
“The program systematically sorts through all the results for the season (season-to-date results for an in-progress season). It takes each result and compares it to what “should” have happened given the ratings of the teams. It knows that if A played C, A should have handled them fairly easily. If A lost that game, or even squeaked by with a narrow victory, its rating is hurt, while C’s is helped.”
The great unknown about the MaxPreps formula is one of the bigger sticking points in the TMC’s proposal.
“It’s a private formula so they don’t really give us full insight about what’s involved with it,” explained Franklin Tech athletic director Joe Gamache. “The Walker is a proven formula that for the most part has accurately seeded the top teams over the years. Now we’re going to change and have to adjust to something we don’t know all that much about.”
Part of that trepidation comes in the section of the MaxPreps rankings that claim, “a team’s ranking is hurt more by losing to a team that is ranked below them than a team ranked ahead.” As Franklin County schools will likely be Division 5 competitors in the vast majority of sports, that could spell trouble in scheduling independent matchups. For example, teams that challenge themselves on the state level during the regular season like Turners Falls softball and Frontier volleyball may run into issues. Schools in higher divisions may not be interested in the risk involved in playing teams from Division 5, opting instead for better rating points by simply playing higher-division teams, regardless of wins or losses.
“Lower division teams and teams that are in weaker leagues are going to struggle to find matchups,” Gamache said.
Graves, who has scheduled Division 1 opponents on a regular basis to play against his school’s softball team, agreed.
“Scheduling is almost certainly going to be an issue,” he offered. “It’s hard enough for us to schedule softball opponents. What’s it going to be like to find teams now? Bigger schools won’t want to play us. Are we going to have to travel? We already play teams across the state now, are we going to have to look even further?”
As part of its proposal, the TMC included a mock-up of last spring’s softball tournament, if it was a statewide affair. Turners Falls would have been the No. 1 seed in Division 5, with Greenfield right behind as the No. 2 seed. The schools are in different divisions under the current format. The rest of the top 10 seeds were Hoosac Valley (No. 3), Narragansett (No. 4), Hopedale (No. 5), Frontier (No. 6), Mount Everett (No. 7), Millbury (No. 8), Bristol County Agricultural (No. 9) and Athol (No. 10).
The tournament fields in every sport are expected to include the top 32 teams in the MaxPreps rankings. Teams with sub-.500 records are eligible if they should finish in the top 32, as the softball mock-up included Mohawk Trail as the No. 17 seed and Pioneer Valley Regional as the No. 18 seed despite both teams finishing with 9-11 records. An addendum to the proposal, though something area ADs are still uncertain about, is whether teams with .500 or better records will still be included in the fields if they fall outside the top 32. The current proposal says they will, meaning any team with a .500 record is still included, though there would have to be play-in games if additional teams make the bracket.
“MaxPreps, they have a proprietary system of how they’ll rank and they won’t release it,” Graves said. “We won’t know how we’re going to get seeded and that’s not a good answer. I know we would’ve been a No. 1 seed in softball, but how? I have no idea.”
Bevis said that relative unknown, which he hopes will be addressed before MaxPreps is implemented, is a legitimate issue.
“The scary part in all of this is we want a clear vision of how teams are being ranked,” said Bevis, who also coaches the boys basketball team at Athol. “The potential is there of it being questioned a lot publicly once rankings for different postseasons come out. The Walker was, for the most part, pretty accurate for who the teams in the finals would be. The guys instrumental in putting that together gave us a fair tournament, in my opinion. Nobody knows what goes into MaxPreps. That’s the most troubling part.”
Troubling to the point that Kuchieski said schools may never know precisely how they’re being seeded and ranked.
“The biggest question is not only the state tournament but how the seeding with MaxPreps is going to work,” the Greenfield AD said. “People guess on what it’s all about. I don’t think anybody knows. I think MaxPreps wants to keep it that way. Other states use MaxPreps, but that’s the biggest snag in a lot of ADs’ heads — how does MaxPreps work? The Walker system works very well for us out here. We like that. The transparency of Walker is right there. You see how it works in front of you, it’s self explanatory. How is whole state gonna be able to do MaxPreps? We’ll see.”
The Western Mass. tournaments, in their current format, date back to the 1970s. Think of the countless memorable moments over the past few decades in Franklin County, title games between area rivals, etc. that can be attributed to sectional tournaments.
If the TMC’s proposal is adopted by the MIAA, the 2020-21 school year would be the last set of sectional tournaments. MaxPreps is expected to take over ranking teams for those final Western Mass. tournaments, giving schools a year to adjust before the statewide tournaments begin in 2021-22.
“The biggest thing is you lose that Western Mass. rivalry thing,” said Graves. “We’ve developed a good rivalry with Lee, for example, in football, that’s carried to volleyball and basketball. The kids get excited to play teams like that. They say it’s going to create excitement across the state but I don’t see our kids getting excited to go across the state to play teams they’ve never heard of before.”
Franklin Tech, which has the majority of its programs playing in the Tri-County League, does not expect to compete at the state level for the most part, Gamache said.
“Losing our sectional tournaments is really going to be a bummer,” the AD explained. “For most of our sports, it’s really the pinnacle. If a team is good enough to compete for a state tournament, they’ll love this opportunity. There are a few exceptions, Turners Falls softball, Frontier volleyball, but the rest of us, it’s kind of nice to try and compete in a Western Mass. tournament and try and win a Western Mass. tournament.”
Bevis echoed that sentiment.
“It’s a special thing, especially for us out in Western Mass.,” Bevis said. “Speaking specifically for us (at Athol), we haven’t had a Western Mass. champion since 2003. The last time we sent a team to the final was 2011, I think. A Western Mass. title would be huge for our school. State titles are hard to come by in any sport. Losing the sectional tournament is huge.”
There has been initial discussion among Western Mass. schools that a sectional tournament could be reinstated in some form. That would require shortening the regular-season slate and perhaps playing an expedited Western Mass. tournament before statewide brackets begin.
“We’ve talked about it but seem to always run into some type of snag,” Kuchieski said. “Every time we try and look at it, something seems to come up as a road block. I don’t know. That’s certainly something that will be discussed but I don’t know if it’s in the cards or not.”
On Thursday, the MIAA will hold a media open house with TMC representatives Jim O’Leary (St. John’s Prep), Johanna DiCarlo (Westborough), Shaun Hart (Burlington) and Sherry Bryant (MIAA Liaison) to present the MIAA Statewide Tournament Proposal. A question and answer session will follow the brief presentation. The presentation will provide the most recent proposal which has received support from the MIAA Board of Directors.
From there, either a February or April vote is likely. Despite resistance from some Western and Central Mass. schools, the vast majority of the voting base resides in the eastern part of the state. Barring what would be a late upset to the process, most throughout the state believe the statewide format is all but a foregone conclusion.
Bevis said that he hopes clarity will come to ADs and coaches throughout the state before votes are cast that will change the fate of the sporting landscape considerably.
“In terms of delivering the message, they have presented to us a couple times at annual meetings,” Bevis said of the TMC. “There’s still a lot of questions with the statewide tournament. Hopefully we’ll get answers to a lot of that before we have to officially vote. It’s kind of sad that it’s come to this. We know that change is never easy, but we’ll see what happens and adjust accordingly.”