The CIF Northern California and Southern California Regional basketball playoffs are not put together by just one person.
CIF State Associate Executive Director Brian Seymour, in charge of CIF State boys and girls basketball, said a network of people, a seeding committee of more than 20 persons, are involved in the process of placing teams into the five divisions of Northern California and Southern California Regional boys and girls basketball.
“We have a seeding committee that goes through the state rankings, teams’ strength of schedules and the power rankings,” Seymour said. “We also have the section commissioners that submit their rankings of their teams that qualified to go to the state tournament.”
Not all of the state’s 10 sections – CIF Southern Section, CIF San Diego Section etc. – use the same power ratings or methods to create their section playoff brackets.
“Which is fine,” Seymour said. “They have to do what’s best for their memberships. We try to take an average of the power rankings and RPI (ratings percentage index) to determine how to group teams into divisions correctly so we can place teams in divisions in which they can compete.”
Seymour said, without going into specifics, that the CIF State Open Division, its top division, will look differently in coming seasons in terms of number of teams and composition of teams. There could be a change, too, in deciding which areas are considered Northern California and which are considered Southern California.
This season is the final season of the current contract to have CIF State basketball championship games at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento. Seymour said the CIF State office has sent “request for proposal” documents to various venues in the state to gauge their interest in being the host site for future state basketball finals.
That could mean that CIF State basketball finals will be in Southern California in coming years. But, Seymour said, that does not mean the CIF State office is unhappy with having the games in Sacramento. The CIF State people have enjoyed a good relationship with Golden 1 Center and with the NBA’s Sacramento Kings who play their home games there.
“I really wish other pro sports teams would act the way the Sacramento Kings have toward high school athletics,” Seymour said.