MITCA Coaches Reject Proposal For Additional Regional Qualifiers
At the MITCA Business Meeting held in Bay City on November 9, 2007, the coaches considered two questions (link to official results):
- should a regional be granted one additional qualifier in the following year if three qualifiers from that regional the prior year placed in the top fifteen and two additional qualifiers if three teams from that regional placed in the top ten.
- should the fourth team at regionals with four in the top twenty be restricted to regions with eight or more complete teams.
The first question received a yes vote from 69% of the coaches who took the time to attend the business meeting and vote. To be forwared to the MHSAA Representative Counsel, a vote of 70% in favor much be achieved. It is reported that the question needed just two more yes votes for the 70% to be acheived. So this proposal will not be forwarded by the representative counsel by MITCA. Even though a significant majority is in favor of this proposal it is rejected for advancement because of the MITCA policy requiring 70%
Some reasons stated by coaches who opposed this proposal voiced one or more of these reasons:
- because it awards bids this year based on last years performances, it would not necessarily reflect the current state of cross country
- there are already too many teams/individuals in the races at MIS and this would further crowd the field
- just because you have three good teams in a regional doesn’t mean that there is a fourth deserving team
- they favored some other solution (one that some like is “self seeding” where each team would pick a regional based on perceived difficulty of that regional)
- they think we get the top two teams to MIS and that is what this is all about and teams that don’t make it this year should work harder for next year.
The second question was favored by 89% of the coaches and so will be forwarded to the representative counsel. Let’s have a discussion of the pro’s and con’s over on the forum …
