SoCal High School & Prep Report

When Is 30 Games Really Only 20?
Here's the Answer.--(December 5,1997)

As we've been pointing out, there are more basketball tournaments going on right now than it is humanly possible to watch. Basketball, especially in SoCal is unique among most other high school sports, because teams can use a whole month at the beginning of the season to prepare for league play. This is also true for soccer, but usually weather and an absence of daylight can limit the number of games that can be played outdoors this time of year. Not so in basketball, which as we all know, can be played almost around the clock, in climate-controlled gyms.

But there's something really interesting about SoCal basketball that we bet you didn't know. Sometimes 1=2, or 2=4, even better, sometimes 2 can equal 5. Yes, it's the advent of new math in Southern Section basketball. And it's only true in SoCal, at least as far as we know.

It's also the reason the teams in SoCal can manage to play 30 and often, even more games in a year all without violating the State CIF Rules which state that a team may only play a maximum of 20 games in a season, not including playoffs.

So how do we do it here? Easy.

According to the Southern Section rules, a team is only "charged" with playing two games for each tournament it enters. Doesn't matter how many games, or how few it plays, the number is always 2. 3=2, 1=2, 5=2. Doesn't matter how many you play, so long as it's at the same tourney, and it's two.

In other words, a team can enter a tournament, play three, four, or more games, and they will only be charged with playing two games. This means that with a regular season consisting of 10 to 12 games of league play (depending of course upon the size of the league---for most a league has 5 or more teams, so each team has 9 to 12 games in league) a team can play in as many as 5 different tournaments, and play a virtually unlimited number of games in each, and still be under the 20 game cap.

What we are therefore now beginning to see is "round-robin" tournaments becoming more prevalent, rather than the single "bracketed" affairs in which a team plays an 8-team event, for example, gets 3 games, and in a 16 team tourney, each team would play four games.

Instead, with the round-robin tournaments, an eight team tournament will now guarantee each team four games, usually on four separate days. Thus, if a team plays in five preseason tourneys (not impossible) it could conceivably get to play in 30 games or more not including the playoffs, including up to 20 additional games in preseason tournament play and, say a regular season of 10 games. Magically, under the CIF Southern Section rules, this only really works out to 20 games, not the 30 actually played. And we guess that if a team really wanted to push it, they could increase that number, limited only by the number of days in December before league play starts in January, as long as they play at no more than 5 tournaments if they have a 10 game regular season.

Pretty neat, huh? We think so.

New Math at it's finest. Only in SoCal.

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