Mark Smith commentary: No, DAC, don’t do it

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Updated: January 25, 2012 9:14AM

CROWN POINT — When I heard that the Duneland Athletic Conference was going to try an in-season basketball tournamnet, like the Porter County Conference holds every January, I was very pleased.

For at least 25 years, I have wished the largest league in this area would adopt what the smallest league has, an eight-team boys and girls single elimination week-long championship.

A celebration of the league ending with boys and girls champions. It’s great for the players. It’s great for the schools’ bank accounts. It hits the front page of the local newspaper. Can’t tell you how excited I was to hear the news.

Until I read the details.

The DAC tentatively is NOT going to have a league championship tournament. The DAC tentatively is going to have two four-team, two-day tournaments over the holidays. Michigan City, LaPorte, Valparaiso and Chesterton will be in one tourney. Crown Point, Merrillville, Lake Central and, for some reason, Portage, will be the other foursome.

The two-day tournaments will have no bearing on league standings and will have no meaning whatsoever since all these teams meet in league games and seven of them (LC is th only exception) will meet in Class 4A Sectional 2 at the end of the year anyway.

Instead of replicating the classic PCC tournamnet, which plays to sellout crowds on the final Saturday, the Duneland Conference has created its own version of the old South County Tournament.

The South County Tournament, which was discontinued this year, goes back to pre-WW II era when the four southernmost Porter County teams played a Christmas tournament against each other basically so everybody in the little town neighborhoods could get together.

Despite the wonderful eulogies written in local papers last month, almost everyone hated the South County tournament because it was a meaningless meeting of teams you already saw in league and sectional play.

Coaches privately begged to get out of it because they wanted to play games that meant something. South County tourney members Hebron, Boone Grove, Morgan Township and Kouts would not restart the South County tournament if they were the only four teams in the state.

So the DAC half-tourney idea is a Depression-era waste of time and potential box office money.

The PCC championship tournament draws about 5,000 fans in a week. An eight-team, DAC tourney would draw twice that many fans because DAC schools are, on average, four times larger than PCC schools. But the the DAC masterminds can’t see that.

School officials, almost to a man, assume that any idea they didn’t come up with cannot possibly have merit and they resist trying it.

The Duneland Conference simply won’t adopt a format idea that has worked in a smaller league, even though it’s an idea theat works in most parts of the state.

To stop the double round-robin 14 game DAC league season, but replace it, in part, with two non-championship four-team tournaments between the same eight member schools is the early runaway front-runner for the dumbest idea of 2012.

The second dumbest idea may be the continued attempts to do away with the one-class high school basketball tournament.

But the IHSAA is being pushed to alter its prsent four-class tournament, which has been in effect since 1998. A state senator who introduced a bill to drop the four-class state basketball tournament and return to the state’s storied single-class high school tournament said last week he will drop his push for the change after the Indiana High School Athletic Association agreed to undertake a new review of the issue.

Sen. Mike Delph of Carmel reportedly said because of that IHSAA “review” commitment, he will drop his push to force the IHSAA to drop the four-class tournament (based on enrollment) that began in 1998.

The class-basketball legislation was part of a larger education bill which would require schools to wait till the end of August to start classes. That bill is hung up in a Senate committee for another week after Sen. Jean Leising (R-Oldenburg) voted no on Delph’s changes, apparently miscounting and believing the amendment would pass anyway.

Instead, the committee deadlocked 4-4. Leising asked if she could change her vote, but Senate rules prohibit that. Delph then dropped his part of the bill.

The review is expected to include meetings across the state to gather input. There is a town hall meeting tenatively scheduled for Merrillville in April. There is a coaches’ association proposal to shrink the number of classes to three, thereby reinstating some local rivalries at the sectional level.

But we are not going back to one class playoffs. Since the heyday of Indiana basketball in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the smaller schools have stayed small while the larger schools have gotten much bigger. There is no way that South Cental and Hanover Central can compete with Lake Central (3,100 students) and Warren Central (4,500 students). Morgan Township never won the Valparaiso Sectional in basketball and they never would have. It seems we are going to need to have an entire generation pass on before we can accept that the same class format that works in football is good for basketball as well.

One thing that will change is the number of classes in the football playoffs. That’s going up from five to six if a football coaches association propsal is adopted by the IHSAA next month. The change is part of a three-point propsal to improve the sport.

Let me me the first to predict that the first two parts of the proposal — to go to a sixth class and to seed sectional play — will be adopted. The third part, a tricky “tradition factor” that automatically bumps a successful teams up a class, will be dropped.

The sixth class is coming. There were 313 schools playing a six-week once-a-week tournament in five classes last year. I don’t have to be a math major to tell you that when we get 321 football playing schools (and more charter schools are starting up every year) that the six week, five class format won’t work. Class 6A is ineviatable.

The long-awaited change is the seeding of each football sectional. This means that if Crown Point is 9-0 and Merrillville is 8-1, they will be seeded in state tournament play as the top seed and the second seed so they cannot meet until the sectional champoionship game. Last season, Wheeler (9-0) and Andrean (9-0) met in the sectional quarterfinals in Class 2A Sectional 25. Fan intersets dropped for the semifinals and finals.

Seeding is something that should have been done 20 years ago.