Player of the Year and All-area selections: How do you do it?

Ballots?

Puts too much power into the hands of the coaches. They get their chance to vote for all-league, all-district, etc., teams. This one is the newspaper jockey's responsibility.

I agree with seeing as many as possible. Show your face at the games, and coaches will see that you're going on what you actually saw. Start thinking about a team, figuring out who the best players are, as soon as possible. Don't be seduced by statistics, since the level of competition isn't necessarily equal for all.

Decide on your own tiebreakers; I usually favor team performance. Not a perfect system, but none are.

Even after seeing as many games and players as possible, pay attention to the all-star games. They might remind you of someone you overlooked. As the season winds down, discuss your possible selections with coaches; you'll be entertained at how many of them badmouth one of their own players in favor of elevating the senior, maybe so he can get a scholarship.

Put together a team you can field. Otherwise, every soccer team would just be a bunch of forwards and midfielders.

Then - and this is the most fun - when coaches and parents call to complain, you can respond with a quick note that you felt this was the best group after going to so many games and speaking with coaches and players all season. If they continue to yell, then you just say, "Well . . . it's my team."

Because in the end, it's your name that's on it. And no matter what Blue-Ribbon Panel of Experts you think you assembled, someone will always complain that Little Johnny deserved a spot because "He was a major contributor defensively! He took two charges a game!"

In other words, I agree with Starman's thoughts.

And for goodness' sake, please do not call a collection of high school athletes a freaking "Dream Team".

 

It's really not that hard. Forget this what they did against their level of competition argument. Just pick the best players and you are, for the most part, fine in the end. If you pick a team that has anything but the best players, people will know. Sure, some people will claim it is so anyway, but if you picked the best players than you don't have a thing to worry about. In football, we pick Overall POY, Offense POY, and Defense POY. Then, we pick our offensive and defensive teams. Those POYs are on the team. In basketball, we take the five best. Would you take Kobe, Lebron, Carmelo, D Wade and Chris Paul on the same team, or would you cut Chris Paul in favor of Jake Voskuhl just because you need a center? If it is a close call on a player, ask yourself who you would take if you were starting a team? And, ask yourself who you think would win in a one-on-one matchup. Don't overthink it and get to GM-ish. You don't need to think about how a kid will fit into the fabric of your team, etc. That's not what you're doing. You're picking the best players from that year.
Outside of that, the only thing we do differently is we require our coaches to nominate players from their team. We don't put a player on one of our teams without a nomination. We get pretty good cooperation from our coaches, and then we just kind of chase after the ones that don't send them in. In the end, we get them all.

 

After doing ours for 20+ years, the procedure is pretty cut-and-dried. We do send nomination forms to coaches, asking for information on their kids, plus athletes they competed against. That stuff is strictly advisory, though. Over the years, though, we know some coaches who will be honest with us, both about their kids and opponents, so we may lean on them for extra information. But coaches have no vote, it's our team so we pick it.

Football is an offensive team, a defensive team (with special teams players), an offensive POY and a defensive POY. Track and swimming are done by events, wrestling is done by weight classes, cross country is 5, field hockey and soccer are 13 (keeper, 4 defenders, 4 midfielders, 4 forwards), baseball is by position, but 2 pitchers, a DH and a utility player. Tennis is 3 singles players and 3 doubles teams. Basketball is 5.

We do pick a POY for each sport and we've decided over the years that the POYs are over and above the individual teams. So for basketball, we're picking a POY, 5 first-teamers and 5 second-teamers.

We pick a first and second team in each sport, but no coaches of the year.

And at the end of the year, we pick an overall male and female Athlete of the Year.

 

Thank you to everybody who replied to my post. I appreciate the quick and honest responses. It gives me a good idea of how to tweak the process a bit and reinforces what I have been doing so far. Thank you once again.

 

in all seriousness.

POY is the newspaper's decision at our joint.

All-State is up to the coaches with newspaper's discretion on breaking ties and honorable mention fillers.

 

Starman, you can pick an all-area team for me any time. Just about exactly how I do it. Our all-area teams don't have first and second teams, just a roster that could actually play, and my HM team is simply twice the size of the all-area, and coaches recommendations aren't automatically included, or the list would be in the hundreds.

 

Maybe. Anything stopping you from starting an All-Paper team? How would that be a bad thing?

 

This.

 

What do you do with the kid who piled up big numbers at a tiny private school that doesn't play any public schools? We all know the level of competition this kid faces is not as good as if he'd played at one of the bigger private schools or at a public. But then you come back to the numbers. You can't deny the kid scored what he scored.

I hate leaving these kids out of the mix because I know the complaints will come, but it has to be the best players we saw. And as someone else pointed out, nobody can really attack you if you you pick the best players. The question is whether you throw these kids a bone and toss them on second team. In basketball, we do 10 first teamers and 15 second-teamers with a 30-school coverage area. Some of these small private school kids aren't going to make it.

Good advice about asking coaches for "input" rather than "nominations." Subtle difference, but important. I'm going to start putting that into practice. We do run a disclaimer with our all-area teams saying the selections are made by our staff based on our observations, statistics and input from coaches.

The other thing I love is when coaches nominate themselves for coach of the year. Happens literally every season in every sport. One coach called our place last year to ask how we pick coach of the year ... he didn't say who he was, just asked how we pick it. Too bad for him, the caller ID showed his name. And no, we didn't pick him.

 

For us, this is a no-brainer. Because Rhode Island is retarded when it comes to HS sports, every "real" sport (I.E. Not running) is broken down into at least two completely independent divisions, meaning that we'll often get a Division II team (which, theoretically isn't as good as a D-I team) that goes on an incredible run and/or has an athletes who has an incredible season.

For this reason, we usually turn our all-area teams into a hybrid of who the best players are AND who had the best seasons.

For instance, when we do our spring section, it'll include baseball. Half our teams are in D-I, the other in D-II.

Now, last year we had one coach who was pissed at us because his third-best pitcher didn't get on the team and someone from the private school in D-II did.

I told him, quite simply, that if we were picking just the best kids, talent wise, he might have a point. But our section is also intended to highlight individual kids who had strong years and this kid from the private school had a better season than his guy, plain and simple.

He didn't like it but I don't care. It is what it is and I'm comfortable with it.

 

One guy at our joint does this all the time, almost every single time.

I used to call him on it, and he said, "If I pick just one rather than two or three co-POYs or COYs, the others will get pissed off."

I said, "Swell. You pick 3 coaches of the year. That still leaves 24 (roughly) who are pissed off."

Everybody gets a trophy. Why not pick 27 co-coaches of the year?

 

Because then the JV coaches would get upset too.