MPA panel backs current tourney system

The Maine Principals’ Association’s interscholastic executive committee has decided to recommend to its membership that the open tournament and regional realignment that are place for nine sports this season remain for the 2002-03 school year.

In making the decision, which was done during a 3-hour, 10-minute meeting Thursday, the committee reviewed the results of a survey it sent to all 153 member schools last year. The survey asked each school to decide what kind of postseason tournament it favored.

Of the 117 schools that responded to the survey, only 31 (26.4 percent) favored the continuation of the open tournament and 45 (38.4 percent) favored regional play.

Although the survey numbers don’t jibe with the committee’s recommendation, the one consistent factor was that no one agreed on what to do. In a posting on the MPA’s Web site (www.mpa.cc) the committee wrote that during Thursday’s meeting there were “numerous motions, none [of] which gained strong support.”

MPA executive director Dick Durost said the committee decided to keep the status quo just to get the issue on the docket for the MPA’s spring meeting of the general membership, which is set for April 25-26 in Rockland.

“The key thing is, by doing this the executive committee can put the resolution in front of the membership and the members will have the opportunity to approve it or go with something else,” Durost said Friday.

The MPA can conduct business with a quorum of 40 schools or more. A simple majority is needed for approval of any proposals, with each member school counting as one vote.

The sports that use an open tournament, the playoff system by which all teams are invited to compete in the postseason, are soccer, field hockey, volleyball, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, softball, tennis and lacrosse. Regional play, which groups teams into Eastern-Western and North-South regions for the playoffs, applies to all of those sports except volleyball, which has only 13 teams in the state, and tennis, which is divided up according to Eastern Maine and Western Maine but does not use North-South divisions.

The sports not using the open tourney are: cross country, golf, swimming, skiing, wrestling, gymnastics, indoor track and field, cheerleading, and outdoor track and field. Football doesn’t use an open tournament because the ranking systems aren’t consistent across the state.

The committee cited several reasons for recommending that the open tournament and regional play remain.

. Based on the survey results there was no clear number of schools that favored one system over another. Thirty-five respondents favored reducing the open tournament to 75 percent, 20 schools favored a drop to 60 percent, 20 schools indicated they wanted to go back to the 50 percent level of the pre-open tournament, and the remaining 11 schools suggested other options.

As for regional play, 69 schools were against the realignment and three were not sure or had no opinion.

That led to eight different options (for example, open tournament with regional alignment, or 75-percent tournament with regional alignment, or open tournament without regional alignment, or 75-percent tournament without regional alignment).

“I don’t think the committee found that one option had more support than another,” Durost said.

. The MPA has used three different systems in the past three years. During the 1999-2000 school year, 50 percent of teams were invited to play in the tournament; in 2000-01 all teams were invited to play; in the current 2001-02 school year the open tournament has been in affect along with regional realignment.

. The open tournament-regional play concept should be afforded more than a year to succeed. Traditionally, the committee wrote on the Web site, policies that come from the MPA’s classification committee, such as regional realignment, are given two years and not revised during that period.

“[The MPA] has a history of giving a chance to things the committee has worked hard to put together,” Durost said.

There are 15 members of the interscholastic executive committee. At least one committee member, Gardiner High principal Roger Lachappelle, did not attend Thursday’s meeting.