All-Area (or county, etc.) teams

With wrestling, I trust all of the coaches in my area because of the rapport I have with them. I don't ... or at least didn't worry until now about them screwing anybody out of a vote. Out of six coaches, five of them will give me an honest-to-God answer if I ask them about a vote.

Before I tallied the votes, I went back and looked at one coach's ballot; one I knew would screw the voting up for the all-area team. I called him up and asked him if he could justify the way he voted, and he went through every kid and did so.

That, I have no problem with. What I do have a problem with is coaches who give every all-area vote to one specific team, like one of our soccer coaches did last year.

 

We solicit nominations from coaches, but in no way would they select our teams. From years and years of hearing tales of their all-league meetings, some of them don't give a shit about anything except getting as many of their kids on the teams and screwing certain other teams.

 

you make me cry actual tears and you aren't even my boss.

 

One coach did the voting for you guys?

 

I think we've run the line that said the teams are based on nominations from the coaches. But we've had two outs if we wanted to put a player on a team that the coach didn't nominate. First, coaches can nominate players on other teams. Second, we had a line — I forget how it was worded — where it said teams are also selected based on observations from the staff (something like that). So if a coach didn't want to nominate a player, I could easily get around it.

 

This may seem too complicated, but it works. With the staff reductions, we don't vote exclusively as a staff like we used to. One, there's not enough to cover every team enough - some of the perimeter teams we never get to.

So we allow the coaches to vote, but we handicap their votes on a percentage basis so where teams that played each other in a district/league/conference vote, their vote is equal to a vote of a team that didn't play everybody and didn't see anybody. It gives some input from all points of the map.

I've thought about using game officials and area junior college coaches, but do they really have time for that or remember the players by name in the case of refereees?

 

One of our dilemmas this year is a coach of the year (that's where the politics get involved): it came down to a coach who got his team to the state finals for the first time in 10 years vs. a coach who lost all his starters from a team that's consistently in the semifinals or finals, and got back to the finals. He's also won this in years past. I'm leaning toward the former, but the coaches will vote for this guy because he's popular. Thoughts?

 

mission accomplished.

 

At my old paper, we took coaches' nominations and made them part of the equation. Our vote was valued more.
At my new place, where I am starting all-area from the ground up, we have nine schools in five different classifications. Obviously, most only play one or two.
I ended up just asking each coach, 'Who did you have to game plan against?' That seemed to elicit pretty good responses.

 

go with your gut.

 

Go with the first guy. If he resurrected a program, that's more impressive than taking kids from a strong feeder system -- or who've played on that successful team for the last two or three years -- and making another run.

 

was gonna say just that, mike, but thought his gut would lead him that way.