When the high school basketball schedule opens Friday, a season of change will be underway.
Teams will seek different district titles and entry points into the state playoffs when February rolls around because of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association’s move from four to six classifications in both boys and girls basketball.
Closer to home, Pittston Area and Wyoming Area boys and girls teams are both part of new divisional alignments within the Wyoming Valley Conference.
All four of the teams will earn playoff seeding through a new process and all but the Pittston Area girls will need to beat out other schools in order to qualify for district playoffs instead of entering open tournaments.
District 2’s changes include both the need to qualify in Class 5A and 4A boys basketball as well as Class 4A and 3A girls basketball. The qualifiers will do so through a new rating system designed by Mid Valley athletic director Tom Nowakowski to rank teams according to all games, not just division play.
That means every game, right from the season opener, will be part of determining where teams fit into district brackets – or if they even make those brackets – two months later.
Pittston Area boys will get the qualification process started Friday night at Hanover Area while the Wyoming Area girls will do the same when they travel to Susquehanna. Pittston Area’ girls will merely start to work on their seeding in a home game with GAR that night.
“We always kind of treated the exhibition (non-league) schedule as, ‘yes, we do want to win, but the key is getting better and getting prepared for the regular season’,” Pittston Area boys coach Alan Kiesinger said. “We can no longer do that.”
Wyoming Area will wait until Dec. 13 to get started in boys basketball, at home against Mountain View.
“I think every coach in the Lackawanna League and Wyoming Valley Conference has to approach every game as a must-win,” Warriors coach Pete Moses said. “We’ve always done that, but some have had the ability or the opportunity to use the non-league games in a different way.”
Moses said the transition from a long football season in which the Warriors reached the district semifinals will be a little tougher on his players involved in both sports.
“We’ve been dealing with some injuries,” he said. “Whereas in the past, getting back in time for the league season would have been sufficient, we’ll be hoping to get guys back sooner.
“At the end of the day, you’re still trying to win every game. I don’t think you’ll know how it all shakes out for two years.”
The new system is in place for two seasons before being reevaluated to see if it will continue in basketball and/or perhaps be useful for other sports like soccer, baseball and softball.
District 2 has relied strictly on league records for basketball qualifying and seeding in almost all cases, with some exceptions in Class 4A subregionals involving District 4’s Williamsport, for decades. In recent times, it has allowed everyone into open tournaments, so league records and division titles won were all that was used to determine most seeds.
The Pittston Area girls have had overall records be a factor the last two seasons when they were part of Class 4A that included Williamsport, so that issue is not new to Kathy Healey’s team.
With District 2 allowing every team in unless there are more than eight in a class, Pittston Area knows it has a postseason girls berth waiting because there are only eight teams in Class 5A girls.
The Pittston Area boys are in Class 5A where nine teams are competing and one will miss the playoffs.
Wyoming Area girls are part of 11 teams working for eight spots in Class 4A while the boys have the toughest task of Greater Pittston teams, trying to be one of eight to make it out of 12 in Class 4A.
Following the PIAA’s switch from four to six classes in football, boys basketball and girls basketball, District 2 decided to end its policy of open tournaments in basketball, but only in the classes where the most schools participate. A total of 73 out of 83 District 2 basketball teams will still get to play in the playoffs, which lead toward championship games at the Mohegan Sun Arena at Casey Plaza in Wilkes-Barre Twp. for the second straight year.
The qualification and seeds will be decided by a complex mathematical formula, which ignores enrollment size of opponents while concentrating on the win-loss record of those opponents. It gives credit for the record of opponents played and combines a modified winning percentage component with the combined rating of opponents based both on their records and taking it to the second level by including the quality of their opponents.
All 22 games – league, non-league and tournaments – count for all teams involved.
Football and basketball non-league games already have been treated more formally than non-league games in other sports.
The new ratings formula was tentatively passed by the Lackawanna Interscholastic Athletic Association and forwarded to the WVC for study. District 2 took the position that, if the two leagues within the district both accepted the same format, the district would follow along.
Nowakowski calculated everyone’s ratings for last year as part of the presentation.
“We were able to compare the way the traditional seeding process played out as how the tournaments were seeded last year and how they would have been through the rating system,” Nowakowski said.
If the system had been used last season, both Pittston Area teams would have entered the postseason ranked higher while each Wyoming Area team would have been lower.
Pittston Area girls would have been seeded second, the position in which they ultimately finished, instead of third in Class 4A. The formula would have rated them higher than Wallenpaupack, the team they were seeded behind, but beat in the semifinals on the way to the title game.
On the boys side, the Patriots would have started out as the 12th seed instead of the 13th.
Wyoming Area’s girls would have dropped from third to sixth and the boys from 10th to 11th.
Step One of the formula is to weigh teams’ wins and losses according to what the opponent’s 22-game record ends up being. Beating an opponent with 18 or more wins counts as 1.3 wins, beating an opponent with 12-17 wins counts as 1.1 win, beating an opponent with 6-11 wins counts as 0.9 wins and beating an opponent with 0-5 wins as 0.7 wins. Similarly. losing to an opponent with 18 or more wins only counts as 0.7 losses while losing to a team with 12-17 wins counts as 0.9 losses, losing to a team with 6-11 wins counts as 1.1 losses and losing to a team with 0-5 wins counts as 1.3 losses.
Once Team A has played Team B, it will hope for Team B to do well in order to have its wins have a positive domino effect on Team A’s ratings. How non-league opponents perform could be more important than league opponents since the results on league opponents will generally cancel each other out as they play each other and one wins while the other losses.
Pittston Area’s Colin Smith, right, defends Melvin Robinson, of Coughlin in Wyoming Valley Conference basketball action last season.
