ROCKPORT – Consider the open tournament closed.

The Maine Principals Association voted Thursday by a margin of more than 2-to-1 to go to a two-thirds (67 percent) rule for interscholastic sports playoffs, thus doing away with the open tournament system that had been in place for two years but never gained total acceptance from athletic directors, coaches and the public around the state.

The vote, which was 60-24 in favor of a two-thirds rule, also did away with the regional play that was used this year. Winslow High principal Brett Moores introduced the motion.

“Today the membership made a strong point about where they wanted to go,” MPA executive director Dick Durost said in the moments after the vote.

The 153-member association is holding its spring meeting Thursday and Friday at the Samoset resort. Eighty-four members took part in the final open tourney vote.

The open tournament was the playoff setup in which all teams were invited to participate in postseason competition in sports that use the Heal Points system to rank teams. Those sports are soccer, field hockey, volleyball, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, softball, tennis and lacrosse.

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

The MPA voted in the open tournament in 1999 and it went into effect in the 2000-01 school year. Proponents of the open tournament said the system provided more opportunities for students to compete into the postseason; its detractors said the open tournament didn’t teach student-athletes the values of working toward a goal of making the playoffs.

Before the 1999 vote, the tournament was last expanded in 1979, when the State Principals Association endorsed a proposal that allowed the teams finishing among the top 50 percent, based on the Heal Point standings, to advance to postseason play. Before 1979, only the top eight teams in each class qualified.

The regional play, which only was in place for the 2001-02 school year, grouped high schools into north-south and east-west divisions. It applied to all open tourney sports except for volleyball, which has only 13 teams in the state, and tennis, which is divided according to east-west but does not use the north-south division.

The benefits of regional play were supposed to include decreased travel, but some schools ended up with trips like Fort Kent to Bucksport (about 470 miles round trip), Madawaska to Guilford (450), and Islesboro to Jackman (314 plus a ferry ride).

Under the new system, which would go into effect in the 2002-03 school year, 67 percent of teams in a classification would receive invitations to compete in the playoffs.

The field of teams would be reduced to eight after one round of preliminary play.

The top four or five teams, depending on the number in each classification, would get a bye through the first round while the rest of the teams would have a playoff (in a classification with 18 teams, for example, the No. 5 seed would play the No. 12 seed and the winner would play the No. 4 seed in a quarterfinal).

It will be up to the individual sports committees to make the new system work with their sport. Fall sports committees, which already met in advance of the 2002 season, likely will meet again.

About 35 minutes of discussion and debate preceded Thursday’s vote.

The open tournament was on the agenda for the 8 a.m. interscholastic division business meeting.

Discussion of the open tournament started with a report from the interscholastic executive committee, which recommended that open tournament and regional play continue for another school year while the committee continued to review the policy.

Included in that report were the results of a survey the MPA conducted in December. Of the 117 member 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. Despite the numbers, the committee couldn’t come to a consensus at a March 28 meeting that lasted about 31/2 hours. No one could decide exactly what to do.

After some talk about the report, and an inconclusive vote about whether or not to accept it, Winslow’s Moores cut to the point.

He introduced a motion to have a 67 percent rule with no regional play. A few minutes later the membership voted and the issue was resolved.

“My motion to get 67 [percent] was a forethought of getting a compromise between those that wanted 75 and those that wanted 50 because if you look at the survey it was pretty well dispersed,” said Moores, a former basketball coach at East Grand of Danforth. “This is exactly what I wanted to do [four] years ago when the open tournament was voted through but in a matter of parliamentary procedure it couldn’t be done unless we voted down the motion that was in place, which was the open tournament. I tried to save the day then but it was a steamroller you just couldn’t stop.”

Bangor High principal and basketball committee member Norris Nickerson, who mentioned a 75 percent policy early in the discussion, was pleased with Moores’ motion. Nickerson favored a move back to the old 50 percent rule, but the two-thirds compromise was fine with him.

“I was totally for this,” he said. “I wanted to go all the way back to 50 percent but the committee consensus was, no, go at least to the 75. When Brett made the proposal I said, ‘Hey, that’s even further back, so that’s better. I’m very happy with it.”

Nickerson would have been all for regional play, but not the way the schedules were set up in basketball this year. In the Class A Northeast, for example, the Big East Conference teams such as Bangor and Brewer played each other during the regular season, but other Northeast schools such as Skowhegan and Lawrence of Fairfield, which are Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference, don’t play regular season games against Big East teams.

“Regional play would have been great but you couldn’t get the leagues to break down that barrier,” he said.

Harris “Butch” Arthers, the Belfast Area High School principal and football coach, did not vote for Moores’ motion because he felt the open tournament deserved more time.

“I wanted to support our committees and let this go one more year,” Arthers said after the vote. “I thought 75 [percent] would have been a good concession but the basketball committee didn’t get a chance to make that motion. At Belfast we’ve always been in favor of an open tournament … but I think [67] percent is a good compromise. We’ll go with it.”

Several other voters raised the issue of supporting a committee’s work during the discussion period. Vinalhaven principal Jeff Aronson said he disagreed with that mindset.

“I can’t see [voting] on behalf of an MPA committee over the needs of our students,” he said during the discussion period.

Few member schools spoke out in favor of regional play. Deering of Portland assistant principal Lenny Holmes told the group he would rather have the open tournament without the regional divisions.

“Even though I support 100 percent the open tournament philosophy, I could not, because of the divisional play, vote in favor of [the committee report] because the divisional play is unfair to athletes,” he said. “… I don’t want to repeat another year where kids with 4-13 records play teams with 5-12 records to go to the [Cumberland County] Civic Center.”

MPA officials had contingency plans in case discussion spilled over into the late morning and afternoon, but the discussion and vote were settled minutes before members had to move on to their next session.

“I think most people came here with their minds pretty much made up,” Durost said. “There’s been a lot of discussion within the schools and the leagues and out in the communities so I think most people knew how they wanted to vote.”

Presque Isle High School Principal Eric Waddell had done enough research in his school to know how he felt.

“I consulted with my athletic director and my coaching staff schoolwide and almost exclusively the opinion of our school was [to support] anything other than what’s going on right now,” he said.

“I enjoyed the discussion today. There were some very valid arguments,” he added. “I understand the argument of giving this another year, but the results of the survey were pretty compelling.”