SC Soccer Forums SCSoccer.com Forums Girls Varsity Soccer Can or should Soccer have its own class in High School??

Good stuff P! Given that over half the teams make the playoffs now, I think it would be okay to put 16 in each division with either a state-wide seeding like football or 5 from each division with one wild-card...that would go to the upper division, naturally

This is good.

Talk to Kevin and find out who (or what committee) we can give this proposal to........so we can watch it get shot down.

...or take the advice of the all-knowing Hobo! 8 from each sounds good to me with the top 8 schools across the state getting byes in the first round. That is still fewer than the current system.

Personally, I think we take far too many teams into the playoffs now. My first thought was to only take the top 4, but after considering that, I went with 12. This proposal has 12-14 teams per conference. I think a team that doesn't finish in the top 28-33% should not expect to make the playoffs. Just my opinion.

Though at Westside we are generally in that percentage of teams not in the top 28-33%, I wonder about having fewer teams in the playoffs.

If less teams made the playoffs, there would definitely be a decline in lopsided first round matches. It would be more of an honor to make the playoffs. The season would end a few days earlier. I could go on...

On the other hand, in some professional leagues, the NBA, NFL, and MLS to name a few, approx. 50% of the teams in the league make the playoffs. Again, even at the highest level, there are some mismatches in the opening rounds of the playoffs. But if only the top 25% of the teams in the league made the post-season, imagine how many late season games would be tanked, players would quit trying, coaches would be fired, etc., because teams would know much earlier in the year whether or not they would qualify for post-season play.

This would be a huge change to the landscape of professional and prep sports in America. MLB Baseball currently only takes a small percentage of teams into the playoffs. In Europe, only the top 3-4 teams from La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, the English Premier League, etc. make the Champions League. Teams that finish 5-8th spot can earn a bid to the Europa League. But still these numbers only amount to about the top %28-%33.

Kind of like Americans preferring a happy ending when they go to the movies; in athletics, we tend to reward mediocrity moreso than in other nations. Perhaps it's because we focus on SO MANY sports. Perhaps there's something about a "feel good" story that is more appealing to Americans than say Germans or the French.

I think taking less prep sports teams to the playoffs would not be a bad idea. I also think it would crush the hearts of many a teenage athlete who dreams to make the playoffs (though those dreams may be crushed even more harshly when their team is pounded in the first round).

Finding a way to set up a series of matches between the top handful of soccer teams across the state in all classifications, and allowing these teams to meet in a central/neutral location to play one another over the course of the year in order to determine an ALL-CLASSES champion will probably be the closest we ever get to the ideas being proposed.

With the sceduling and organizational skills of coaches like Steve Lea, Kevin Heise, Bill Tooley, etc. (on the girls side), I honestly believe South Carolina could make this happen and do it WITHOUT changing the whole system.

Here's to the hope that someone really does take the initiative...

Lets be realistic. It is the same scenario as the expantion of the NCAA Tournamen. The state gets a big percentage of the gate from every playoff game. If someone is serious about changing the system then they need to go into it with that in mind. Make a proposal and set an official meeting with SCHSL to discuss it. Keep in mind that anything that is going to reduce money coming into SCHSL is going to be shot down. Take your proposal into with them but keep the current amount of play-off teams or if you really want to make them interested, increase the numbers of playoff teams. Look at the Big 16 in football. Every team gets in.
The state that I moved from allowed everyone into the playoffs. The first week of the playoffs were the district tournament (Region tournament in SC). The regular season champion and the tournament champion (team losing in the finals if the regulars season champion also won the district tournament) went on to what was called the region tournament. This was done in the second week and the two teams that made it to the finals of the region tournament went on to the sub state (winner played at home loser traveled). I like the idea of making the divisions more equal, but if you want to have a chance of change, dont take money making games away. Add more to be considered seriously.

Good point CoachCal. Of course, I really don't expect this idea to be taken seriously by the league or AD's. It goes against the system already set up by class/regions with separate class specific rules and region administrators to coordinate tiebreakers, schedule coordination, all-region teams, etc, etc, etc.... A separate system with conference coordinators, etc would have to be set up just for girls' soccer to get this to work. If you also implemented it for boys' soccer, the conferences would have different schools so there would have to be another separate system for boys.

That's why I called it dreaming.

You could still keep the same number of playoff games under this system. Take the top 10 teams from each conference and 2 wild cards to get 32 teams like today. I think you'd still have a greatly reduced number of first round blow-outs due to the fact that the divisions are selected by historical performance and promotion/relegation. It would make for more exciting playoffs since the first round matches would be much less predictable than they are now.