Region Tourney formats

If I'm not mistaken the Northwest Region is the same with 2 teams each from the Cardinal, Cedar Run, Commonwealth and Western Valley is the same as the Eastern. 2 wins and you're in the State Tournament.

We in the NR like the format of 16 teams. Midlo Dad and I talked a bit in another thread on the merits of the differences. He cited the Central Region's decision to put more emphasis on the regular season and less on post season tournaments in determining who moves to regionals.

The counter to that in our region is that the wider format allows teams to continue to improve over the course of the season and although the regular season determines the seeding for the district tournament, you can overcome a bad regular season if you keep improving and get hot and healthy at the end of the year.

I wondered if travel costs are an issue for the larger regions, because it's not an issue within the Northern Region due to proximity. The NR games, typically on a Friday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday format are a big draw. The round two games, traditionally held on Memorial Day, get big crowds.

Travel should not be an issue here. ODU is much less than an hour for just about any school in the region. I did notice that the format for the Patriot District tourney gave a big advantage to those teams that performed better in the regular season (bottom 4 teams played each other for the right to play the 3rd and 4th place teams and the 1st and 2nd place teams await the winner of those games) That is probably a good format to ensure you best teams advance and it appears that the 1st and 2nd place teams in the regular season have an automatic bid to region play.

yes, this is how it works. Top #1 and #2 are automatically qualified into regionals and get byes into the district tourney semifinals. There is one additional benefit if you are the regular season winner. You cannot fall below #2 even if you lose in the semis.

So this system has rewards for the regular season and still gives everyone a chance, somewhat like basketball.

One other scheduling factor I've noticed is that because the Northern region has the 4 round regional tournament and districts, with play-in rounds, can have up to 4 rounds, their regular season games end almost a week earlier than in the rest of the regions. This gives the top teams a chance to rest their pitching a bit, another advantage for the top finishers in the regular season.

I can't see why a 4th place team of a high school district should have the same opportunity as the champion or #2 team in regional play(aside from a seed advantage which depending on who out there has a "big arm" may not even be an advantage)? I do not know why the Northern Region does this but baseball should be about rewarding the best teams over the long-term of games played, not one that gets "hot" over the weekend. It is competition, reward the teams that competed the best, not wipe the season standings clean and set up a sprint situation for teams that were less-than.

The 1st team this year to clinch an NCAA D1 Regional bid was Texas Southern. They were 16-32 overall and #8 in the SWAC at 7-17, but won the SWAC tournament. Their RPI is #292 and their Strength of Schedule is #275 of 293 teams. That is a bad team that should not be in line for NCAA postseason play, but they just hung around and hung around and then put up the miracle 5-run 8th inning to win 12-11 in the tourny final. What is good about that? TSU is in the field of 64 and about 212 teams better than them won't be.

I do like the MLB Wild Card but even that is about rewarding teams that played well over the long run. Just a thought.

The regular season winner gets the following benefits:

- bye into the district semifinals, with semifinal games against team no better than 4th place in regular season
- Ability to win 2 games and win district tournament - and be named District Champion (the regular season winner gets no banners, medals, patches)
- 7-10 days off from last regular season game until district semifinals
- no worse than #2 seed win or lose coming out of district into regional tournament
- guaranteed home game in first round of regionals

If you finish 5-8 in your district and think that getting into the district semis (and qualifying for region) is easy, its not. Normally the sequence has first round 5 vs 8, and 6 vs 7. Then then second round with 3 playing the winner of 5/8 and 4 playing the winner of 6/7. Semis have 1 playing against 4 or whoever beats 4 and 2 playing 3 or whoever beats 3.

This year, no 5-8's in any of the four NR districts made it through to the regionals, and while none is unusual, not very many 5-8's normally advance.

I don't know the overall rationale, but it has been this way for many years. This does give all the teams an opportunity for some extra games, and right now in the NR, some of the competition for better players with the private schools revolves around the VHSL game limits vs the extra games that privates can play. Maybe this is a partial remedy for that. Competitively, it does place a premium on pitching staff depth to go far. This approach to districts and regional qualifying (with top 4 teams in each district advancing to regionals) is used in most team sports, for sure in baseball, softball, basketball, volleyball, s****r, lacrosse, field hockey.