The IHSA Board Meeting on Monday came with a significant change to sub-sectionals.
The Board approved a recommendation to amend Board Policy 18 to use true seeds in sub-sectionals, expcept when a conflict arises with pre-determined regional hosts.
That means regionals will be assigned completely by sub-sectional seeding. This affects every sport that uses the sub-sectional model like basketball, volleyball, baseball, and softball.
Just in the past year multiple instances saw some regional sites with unfair seeding situations. At the Chester 2A Regional in boys’ basketball, #1 Belleville Althoff and #4 Pinckneyville were powerhouses compared to the competition of #9 Sparta, #10 Chester, #11 Du Quoin, and #12 Red Bud. Meanwhile the Carlyle regional – the half of the sub-sectional – was loaded with the likes of #2 Breese Central, #3 Columbia, #5 Carlyle, #6 Nashville, #7 Breese Mater Dei, and #8 Trenton (Wesclin). That was just one such case of a both sites in a sub-sectional being put in unfair positions.
