4A and 5A Regional Basketball Finals

[moondog24]

How long has the Girls Union had teams playing in the Regional Finals hosting games. In tonight's games, home teams won 14 of 16 games. Only Marion in 4A and SE Polk in 5A managed victories on the road. In some cases the visiting team had to travel well over 100 miles (on a school night). Certainly there are facilities available halfway between these schools. This is ridiculous!

 

[RamBling]

Believe it has been two seasons now (2015 and 2016) - its all about the Benjamin's($$$) Much bigger home crowds and many more students (especially at the large school level). It has and will result in a interesting quandary - seeding now becomes critical, scheduling becomes more difficult because seeding is based on record up to (approximately) January 26th, therefore teams won't schedule tough non-district rivalry games before that date. The Union tries to play coy by not revealing exactly when they will reduce the pairings and it goes around and around (check the schedules for all the great match-ups on or after January 19th).

Argument from the Union will be "its too expensive to have neutral court games for every final, look at football, they don't go to a neutral site until the semi-finals - basketball goes neutral (Wells Fargo) at the quarterfinal round."

Personally, I completely agree that a game that important should be determined on a neutral court.

 

[Hawkeye_7]

However, to determine who gets the home game to go to state it is based on the final rankings of the year. So, even if you don't agree with the move they are factoring in the whole season to determine who gets that final home game. FYI, they tried it in 5A last year and had a huge increase in attendance so they wanted to try it in 4A this year. It is not something that will happen in 3A or lower because not all of the gyms qualify to host a post season game, apparently, every 4A and 5A gym in the state does.