Central Section question
- Thread starter colhenrylives
- Start date
OK, and this is fairly important, I think: According to CIF's Erin Davenport, the SoCal and NorCal basketball committees can decide, while doing the bracketing in the weekend before the Regionals, to switch teams from the South to the North. (It's already done in football, and is an option in volleyball and basketball.)
Given the geographic reality, the teams that would switch would only be from the northern half of the Central Section, or the few Southern Section schools (Mammoth, say) that are much more northerly.
It would obviously be a very complicated situation, but the move, at this point, would be based solely on geography. A factor is that SoCal has committed to filling out all its regional brackets, something the North hasn't done, in part because there may not be enough legit qualifiers (girls' D3 last year is an example). Issues:
1) SoCal divisions are determined by competitive equity not enrollment, which is why Long Beach Poly (4,500 students) played St. Francis (800 boys) in the state D2 basketball championships last year. Presumably a team classified by SoCal as D4 would be placed in the NorCal D4 regardless of enrollment.
2) Travel -- let's say Chowchilla is moved into D4, and wins game one against a CCS team, but now either hosts or travels to Ferndale. Not ideal ...
3) Competition. So let's Chowchilla was the top seed in D4 in the South, but at the last minute got moved into the North. The top NorCal D4 teams not only see their chances of advancing to State damaged, but also have no way to prepare for a team they haven't seen or scouted.
Oh, and there's nothing that says it couldn't happen in the Open, though I don't think CIF would invite that kind of controversy in year one.
Finally, the talk of the Central Section moving to the North is substantial, but the biggest barrier, as above, is geography. The Central Section is all for it, but my guess would be the existing NorCal sections would not be as excited about having a bunch of really good teams suddenly challenging them for berths at state.
Given the geographic reality, the teams that would switch would only be from the northern half of the Central Section, or the few Southern Section schools (Mammoth, say) that are much more northerly.
It would obviously be a very complicated situation, but the move, at this point, would be based solely on geography. A factor is that SoCal has committed to filling out all its regional brackets, something the North hasn't done, in part because there may not be enough legit qualifiers (girls' D3 last year is an example). Issues:
1) SoCal divisions are determined by competitive equity not enrollment, which is why Long Beach Poly (4,500 students) played St. Francis (800 boys) in the state D2 basketball championships last year. Presumably a team classified by SoCal as D4 would be placed in the NorCal D4 regardless of enrollment.
2) Travel -- let's say Chowchilla is moved into D4, and wins game one against a CCS team, but now either hosts or travels to Ferndale. Not ideal ...
3) Competition. So let's Chowchilla was the top seed in D4 in the South, but at the last minute got moved into the North. The top NorCal D4 teams not only see their chances of advancing to State damaged, but also have no way to prepare for a team they haven't seen or scouted.
Oh, and there's nothing that says it couldn't happen in the Open, though I don't think CIF would invite that kind of controversy in year one.
Finally, the talk of the Central Section moving to the North is substantial, but the biggest barrier, as above, is geography. The Central Section is all for it, but my guess would be the existing NorCal sections would not be as excited about having a bunch of really good teams suddenly challenging them for berths at state.
I'd be all for it, in general. But one big issue that needs to be addressed is the limit of four teams from any section in the Open. To be fair for everyone else, that limit needs to be removed for the Southern section.
Yes. The Southern Section is really a separate state all by itself. It contains more schools than all of NorCal combined.
