Seeding approved for WIAA soccer, tennis tournaments
STEVENS POINT - State tournament seeding took further hold in the state Wednesday.
The WIAA Board of Control approved plans to seed its state tournaments for soccer and team tennis at its monthly meeting. Both measures, which will take effect in the 2017-'18 school year, passed by 10-1 margins.
The votes marked the third and fourth times the board approved plans to seed state tournaments. Boys volleyball began seeding in 2012. Last June, a plan for a two-year trial beginning in 2017-'18 was approved for boys hockey.
In those sports, coaches from the qualifying teams seed the top four teams in the eight-team field. The remaining schools are paired randomly.
Division 1 team tennis, which has an eight-team field, will follow the same setup. In Division 2, which has a four-team field, the top two teams will be seeded and the remaining two placed randomly.
Tennis already seeds its individual tournament. After the sectional, a panel of coaches meets to put together the bracket. The initial plan called for those coaches to also seed the team tournament, but the proposal was amended so that the participating coaches would do the seeding.
A common thread for the sports the WIAA has approved seeding for so far had been the ability of the teams to play each other or have common opponents during the season.
That doesn't apply to soccer. With 272 boys teams this past season and 254 girls teams last spring, soccer is the biggest sport to gain approval for the seeding of its state tournament.
The seeding of those tournaments will take a different tact. Coaches from the four teams that make the state tournament in Division 1 and the four in Division 2 plus the president of the Wisconsin Soccer Coaches Association will provide the nine votes that seed the field in Divisions 1 and 2. The coaches from Divisions 3 and 4 along with the WSCA president will follow the same formula to seed the lower two divisions.
“They felt that would be a better way of knowing state-wide about the other division,” associate director Deb Hauser said. “One and two should know about each other and three and four should know about each other, so they thought that would help with not having the head-to-head (meeting).”
In other WIAA news Wednesday:
* The board passed a measure that beginning next school year will call for tennis teams to count events in which it uses its junior varsity or varsity reserve in a varsity event toward the school's varsity maximum of 14 events for the season.
The change could end the practice some coaches have used of playing JV or varsity reserve players against some of the team’s easier competition while sending their better players to face tougher teams or participate in higher-caliber tournaments. The change, however, could also make it harder for schools to fill their tournament fields, something JV and varsity reserve squads have been counted on to do over the years.
* The 2017 and ’18 football seasons will begin Aug. 1 with equipment issued on the first day of practice. The change eliminates the July 31 and July 30 starting dates that were originally scheduled for those seasons.