District 6, schools should set standard for postseason play
There’s no need to earn a spot in the District 6 basketball playoffs.
Everyone’s invited.
Whether a team goes 22-0 or 0-22 during the regular season, it can play for a shot at the district championship.
Because, the way the district sees it, “the more schools that participate, the more student-athletes we can get involved in the tournament, the better.”
That’s the word from tournament co-director Bill Marshall.
Above all, Marshall said, the district tournament is about the experience for all the kids. More important, even, than crowning a district champion.
Walk into any high school across the state, and that line of thinking rings hollow. There are trophy cases celebrating championship teams. There are banners hanging in the gym with the years of championship teams embroidered on them.
When you reach the playoffs, it’s about winning championships. And a spot in the District 6 basketball playoffs should be earned.
A standard — something that exists in other districts in the PIAA — needs to be set to limit the postseason field. Otherwise, the postseason is watered down like it was in Class AAAA two years ago when the State College boys’ basketball team entered the tournament with a 2-20 record.
This season, all seven Class AAA boys’ basketball teams in the district entered the tournament.
No. 7 seed Bellefonte, which takes on No. 2 seed Somerset in the first round Monday, finished the regular season with a 6-16 record.
“We played better than what the record indicates,” Bellefonte coach Darin Hazel said, “so that was an opportunity for our kids, to get a chance to reward them.”
But the playoffs should be a reward for success, and if the district won’t set a standard, the schools should.
Bellefonte simply does not belong in the district playoffs.
The Red Raiders went 0-8 against other Class AAA schools, and the team’s six wins aren’t exactly impressive.
Two wins over struggling Class AA program Philipsburg-Osceola. Two wins over Juniata Valley, a Class A school that finished the season with a losing record. And two wins over Central, the weakest team in the 11-team Class AA tournament field.
But Bellefonte decided to enter the district playoffs largely for two reasons:
“We were playing pretty good basketball at the end of the year,” Hazel said.
“We decided since we’re so young, we wanted to get some of the youngsters some experience in a playoff situation,” Hazel said.
They sound more like rationalizations for the school’s decision.
We were playing pretty good basketball at the end of the year. Yes, the Red Raiders were playing better at the end of their season, but they couldn’t handle Class AAA opponents or Class AA playoff teams. Bellefonte went 4-5 in its last nine games, a span that included double-digit losses to Tyrone, Juniata, Jersey Shore and Shikellamy.
The fifth loss?
A 46-43 setback to rival Bald Eagle Area.
In the week leading up to that game, BEA coach Bill Butterworth told his players that they would not be going to the District 6 Class AA playoffs.
The Eagles were mired in a nine-game losing streak and owned a 4-16 record with two games left on the regular-season slate. Butterworth explained the decision to his players by listing off specific losses to the top teams in the district — a 44-point beatdown delivered by Bellwood-Antis, a 23-point loss to Penns Valley, a 22-point setback to West Branch. The Eagles even lost to Richland, which grabbed the No. 9 seed in the Class AA playoffs, by 19.
BEA was not competitive enough to warrant postseason consideration.
Plus, the Eagles were far from the .500 mark — a specification the school prefers its teams come close to meeting to enter the playoffs. And they were well short of Butterworth’s standard for postseason play.
“I try to set our team goal as getting around nine wins by the end of January,” Butterworth said.
BEA finished the season 5-17 with a pair of wins over Bellefonte.
Its hypothetical postseason resume, determined by District 6’s rating system, is nearly identical to the Red Raiders.
Bellefonte earned a rating of 1.55, according to that system; the Eagles tallied a 1.50 based on their total body of work.
Butterworth decided his team didn’t do enough.
Bellefonte decided to keep playing.
We wanted to get some of the youngsters some experience in a playoff situation. According to the Red Raiders coach, the extra practice time and playoff experience will be beneficial for the future.
Except that’s not the point of the playoffs. It’s about crowning a champion for the 2015-16 season. It is not about getting ready for the 2016-17 season, which is still nine to 10 months away.
An extra week or two of practice now will have little-to-no effect on next year.
An offseason of dedication — summer days spent on the court and fall nights spent at open gyms — will.
Maybe those young, returning players would be more motivated to reach the postseason if they missed out this year — if they had to earn it, instead of being handed the opportunity by the district and their school.
This story was originally published February 21, 2016 at 9:47 PM with the headline "District 6, schools should set standard for postseason play."