The stupidest thing your state high school association allows to happen

Iowa may be worse than Texas.

Iowa has a holiday break for hoops but, as has already been pointed out, you have football & volleyball in the fall, basketball and wrestling in the winter, track in the spring and baseball and softball in the summer. State baseball tournament usually ends only one to two weeks before football practice starts.

Also, Iowa used to hold a fall baseball season for small schools that did not have football teams. Not sure if they still do that though.

 

I have a rotation system in place. The season usually begins with the Kansas team I cover playing a single game with the Missouri team right over the line. No problem there, because Missouri plays softball in the fall.

Then the softball team usually has its home tournament. Baseball takes that day off.

The remaining four home dates for each conflict. So from that point on it's focus on baseball the first time, softball the second, baseball the third, then softball on the last one.

The only glitch in that this year is that the only home track meet was held the same day as home baseball and softball. So I chose track. It would have been softball's turn that day. Baseball would have been today (they rescheduled that single game with the Missouri team I referred to before), but it got rained out and it won't be made up.

What I'm going to do now is give baseball the last turn of the regular season instead of softball. The softball team is hosting the regional tournament, so it will end up working out the same way. Without the rain out, softball would have had two turns in a row.

After 15 years of doing it this way, everyone gets it, so I don't usually hear anything.

 

In VA, the state is split into four different regions. It works in A and AA, but not really in AAA. Three of them are centered around the state's three metro regions -- NoVa, Richmond and Hampton Roads. The fourth is the rest of the state. Nothing like a team traveling 250 miles one way to a first-round volleyball playoff game on a Tuesday night.

Traditionally PA has an East vs. West championship format for team sports. However since the Philly public and Catholic schools joined the PIAA, teams from the East have been shipped west to balance the brackets. In fact, it's now common for the AAAA boys final to be between to two suburban Philly schools located 15 minutes apart. (And they face each other 150 miles from home at Penn State).

The fair thing (in PA) would be to have the district boundries shift around by class. Presently there are 12 districts (6 in East and 6 in West) that are defined by county lines. Rural districts could have dozens of A and AA teams and one or two in AAAA; a suburban and urban districts have the opposite.

 

No fall baseball season anymore, but there used to be a fall and spring soccer season, and schools had a choice of when to play. We were eventually down to one area school playing fall soccer, and they expected us to give them more coverage because they were playing. Finally, the state association ruled that there would be only one soccer season.

 

Every couple of years in New York they have a problem with the Carrier Dome during football championships. Section III (Central Region) and Section IV (Southern Tier), alternate hosting the first round of the state playoffs (they always play each other first round). However there is a verbal understanding that when the Carrier Dome is availible and it's Section IV's turn to host they'll play at the Dome. By this time in New York it's freezing, no one wants to be outside anyways and everyone wants to play in the Dome so it's usually not a problem.
Now Sections III and IV cover a HUGE area, literally from Canada (near Kingston, Ontario to Pennsylvania). To be honest half the time the team that's hosting is the one that gets screwed. This year Section IV decided that they'd play in Binghamton no matter what.
The shit hit the fan. The Section III team (who got crushed) had to travel an extra 90 minutes, for a grand total of 3 1/2 hours. The Section IV team was actually closer to Syracuse than Binghamton. The kids played in freezing rain while the swine flu epidemic was in full swing, the schools had enormous travel costs and Section IV ended up looking like douchebags.
The funny thing is, the boys basketball playoffs are ALWAYS held at SUNY Cortland, a Section III site. No one from Section IV bitches because the Section IV teams are always closer. Two years ago a team from the Canadian border had to travel 2 1/2 hours in a blizzard to get there, while the Section IV team we cover drove 45 minutes.
They're both in the middle of the state, but both on the edge of the sections.

Moving on, I think state and section sanctioned champion sites should be required to have wireless. Seriously people, you just spent two million on this new turf stadium. Is it really that much too ask for?

I think its weird that different sections have different rules regarding public and private school championships. For years, the Buffalo area separated the two. Here everyone is combined. In one Section a team just decides if its good enough to move up in any given sport. In another if they win a championship for a certain number of years they're automatically moved up.

 

My state has no official outlet to keep league standings, so it's up to the coaches to designate one coach to compile all of the scores and standings. Some coaches do not report their scores, even to the coach charged with compiling them.
The small schools are all hundreds of miles apart and report to different newspapers, many of which do not publish online, so it's often impossible to know the standings. I've had instances where teams I cover start the playoffs on Thursday and find out who their opponent is on Tuesday.

 

Mississippi has the weird geography thing going, too.
All of their sports follow a North/South split for the playoffs, which works well for the most part. The problem is in the 1A and 6A classifications, where there's fewer schools spread far apart.
Greenville and Natchez are in no man's land. Greenville is about 100 miles from Jackson or Memphis, and there's no other 6A schools near it. Because of highway access it usually gets thrown into a district with schools from Jackson and Vicksburg, which are about 90 minutes away.
Natchez has it worse. For football it's lumped in with schools from Meridian (on the other side of the state, probably 175 miles away), Hattiesburg (90 minutes) and the Jackson area (90 minutes). And there's no easy way to fix it, because it's the only 6A school in the southwestern quarter of the state.
And, of course, there's Tupelo which is four or five hours away from anything.
The worst part of all this is the way the divisions line up for the playoffs. The two Central Mississippi divisions play the two North Mississippi divisions. That means lots of three- and four-hour bus trips for first-round blowouts, one-off playoff games and regional tournaments.
It can be quite a pain in the ass.


Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the separate private school association yet. That has teams from Louisiana and Arkansas. There even used to be a few from Alabama and Tennessee. I've traveled to Baton Rouge and two-thirds of the way to Shreveport for playoff games before. One of our schools played a football season where their six road games didn't include a trip less than two hours, and they played in three different states.

 

Maxpreps paid the PIAA something like $10K to be the "official" Website for stats. We were told that the schools would be required to at least post their schedules, results and rosters for each team. Glad to see that it's being strictly enforced. Thank goodness there are a handful of local papers around the state that do a good job doing all of that on their Websites.

 

Oh, and it's worse for the 1As, where you have teams from the Starkville area playing in the South State playoffs, because approximately half of the 1A schools are in the northern third of the state. In fact, there was a first-round baseball playoff series just completed between Weir (15 miles west of Starkville) and Sacred Heart, which is the Catholic school in Hattiesburg. Nice little 3 1/2 hour bus ride, that.

 

A buddy of mine in undergrad went to some private school in West Memphis, AR. I always found it bizarre that they played under a Mississippi sanctioning body. There aren't a whole lot of private high schools in Arkansas, but they are allowed to play under the same sanctioning body as the public schools.

Growing up in Texas, I always loved that the state refused to allow private schools to compete with the public schools. I hate when you end up with dominant athletic private schools like Evangel. I don't know if it's still that way or not, but I think it is.

 

Iowa to American Legion baseball: Fuck yourself. You're in our territory.

Apeman: That Kansas track crap was pathetic. Who runs that, the YMCA?

Track may be best in Texas where the state meet is at UT-Austin.

In those "every plays, everybody playoffs" sports in Oklahoma, they also have these "conferences." Why any paper up there would keep up with the conferences is beyond me. From what I knew up there, half the damn teams who called in shit to papers never knew what conference records they had. Then you got the puffed-chested parents and coaches whose kids beat a 3-20 team to win their first district championship in seven years in those sports (READ: DISTRICTS BEING DECIDED BETWEEN TWO TEAMS) and they get a freakin' plaque and rail on the papers when the papers refuse to run their damn team picture for a district championship. After all, if you have 50 teams in your area, that's the possibility of 25 district champions. Idiots.

 

I'm sure this has already been complained about but catholic school and private school teams in public leagues. Our town 2 years ago for the section title loss to a JAIL. That is right, a juevy, a team of guys from the city who were in jail at the time. There are a couple catholic schools from around here in public school leagues. We have a decent, baseball team, we played a catholic school 2 times during the season lost 38 to 1 combined. My dad's friend his son was quarterback of a team that made it the state final at the carrier dome. They lost to a catholic school. It is uneven playing field. They can recruit and we can not. The explanatory is that there is not enough to have a league. Which is bs. Mist if the teams are only an 1 hour and 1 and half from NYC at the most, why can they not play down their. Or join some of the private school leagues.