FRANKLIN — The MIAA’s Tournament Management Committee put the final touches on its proposal for a statewide tournament Tuesday, with the Board of Directors set to discuss it Wednesday.
The TMC is nearing the finish line of a two-year process with a goal of establishing consistency in every sport, with equal paths to championships. That means more consistent seeding, formats, and better matchups with a statewide tournament, and the implementation of MaxPreps’s system for power seeding.
The Board of Directors may or may not choose to vote on the proposal Wednesday, and it could potentially ask the TMC to restructure it.
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If the board approves the proposal, and the committee’s suggestion to form a special assembly of the 380 MIAA member schools, the TMC plans to spend January educating members on the benefits of a statewide tournament, which would launch in the fall of 2021 along with divisional realignment.
“We’ve made lots of presentations over the last two years,” said TMC chair Jim O’Leary. “At some point, you have to make a formal presentation and say, ‘This is why it’s good for the state.’ One way or another, we have work to do going forward. So we need a direction.”
The TMC voted that football would follow an eight-week schedule to get more data for seeding. It voted in favor of not counting exclusion games toward the statewide seeding process, voted to fine schools $300 if schedules were not updated on MaxPreps on Sept. 1, Dec. 1, and March 15 prior to the respective start of each season, and voted to allow sport committees to appeal the final number of qualifiers based on the number of teams in each division.
“There are going to be things we didn’t game plan for, but by at least throwing bad scenarios out there, it prepares us to go in knowing what we’re up against,” said Burlington athletic director Shaun Hart.
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“[Wellesley AD] John [Brown] probably said it the best: It’s the biggest proposal for the MIAA in the last 25 years.”
If a statewide tournament is not approved, the TMC will go back to work with the intention of creating a more fair and consistent format for all sports.
But the committee hopes that when it next convenes, on Jan. 9, 2020, it will be discussing how to educate MIAA member schools on the benefits of this new statewide format.
“The right tournament is in front of you,” Hart said. “But in case that doesn’t get voted through, we want to be able to go back to an alternative option by making sections even and balanced in a different way.”
Nate Weitzer can be reached at nathaniel.weitzer@globe.com.