State soccer draw unfairly pairs EV, WV in first round
Something is just off about the girls state Class 2A soccer tournament.
No, that doesn’t quite cover it.
It’s just plain wrong.
Great Northern League champion West Valley and district champion East Valley both battled their way into the state tournament. To get there, the teams played each other three times during the regular season, and again in the district finals last week.
They met for a fifth time this season in a first-round state tournament game Wednesday night at East Valley.
It’s the state tournament. Teams battle their way through a tough regular season, through district and regional battles, for the chance to test themselves against the best the entire state has to offer.
Instead, the WIAA served these two teams up a heaping helping of callous indifference.
“I am disappointed,” East Valley coach Gabe Escobar said. “This is our 19th game of the season and we’ll have played West Valley in almost a third of those games.”
As teams from the same region, the Eagles and Knights should have been seeded into opposite sides of the 16-team state bracket. Or at the very least, opposite quarterfinal brackets so they wouldn’t meet until the state semifinals – the way the Class 4A bracket handled Central Valley and Mead a year ago.
Let’s be blunt. If the draw were to pull up two teams from a Greater Seattle conference to play a first-round match, the WIAA would have thrown it out and started over – if for no other reason than that there are inevitably coaches from those leagues present for the draw.
It’s tough on Spokane-area coaches to make the trek to the shores of Lake Sammamish for a Sunday morning draw, although I’ve had area coaches tell me over the years that it’s the only way to prevent things like this from occurring to their teams.
Instead of looking at a draw that has two teams from the same league playing in the first round of the tournament and recognizing just how unfair it is to ask these teams to play each other for a fifth time and setting about fixing it, you would almost think there was an unspoken relief that they had just guaranteed having one less travel headache to deal with for the quarterfinals.
It’s a badly held secret that folks on the West Side of the state hate driving across the mountains to play in Eastern Washington – especially when there’s a threat of inclement weather. It’s a running joke.
And it’s also the first rule of drawing the girls state soccer tournament.
Open the list of rules for setting the bracket, and the No. 1 rule is:
“Due to the desire to prevent teams from traveling across the mountains, West Side and East Side teams shall not meet until the finals when possible.”
Simple math tells you that such an edict is not possible, so how does the draw handle the inevitable across-the-mountains travel trouble?
They are cautious about sending teams eastward, but have no problem sending teams from Eastern Washington west.
The bracket sent Fife to play at Ephrata in an opening match. The Tigers are the No. 1 seed from the Eastern region and Fife is a low seed from a region with six berths into the tournament.
Granted, Ephrata was ranked No. 2 by a West Side newspaper’s soccer rankings, and the odds of them falling in the first round are long. But if Fife pulls off an upset, it would host the WV-EV winner in the quarterfinals.
“I understand the way things worked out,” Escobar said. “Fife is the last team in from that district. Why would they host a second round win if they upset Ephrata?
“We tied our state berths in with the Central Washington Athletic Conference. To do that deal, the CWAC protected its top team, meaning we were all playing for the No. 2 and No. 3 seeds. But still.”
This kind of thing should not have happened. And it would not have happened to teams from west of the Cascades.