WIAA approves major changes to state basketball’s RPI format — and might implement in other sports
Two major changes have been approved to the state’s RPI rankings for boys and girls high school basketball.
One change: Out-of-state opponents will no longer all be considered teams with a .500 record — so facing an elementary school team from Alaska will no longer be considered the same as facing the Golden State Warriors.
The other change: District playoff games will be included in a team’s RPI — so Kentwood can beat Union and Federal Way to win the district title and not be ranked behind those schools when teams are seeded into the state tournament.
Those adjustments were approved by the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association’s executive board and will be put into effect for the 2017-18 season.
“We have one year of data and that has helped us a lot,” said Greg Whitmore, who chairs the WIAA’s RPI committee and is the athletic director of Lind-Ritzville High School. “And we’ll look at it again with two years of data. We’ll make this better each year.”
The next step might be implementing RPI rankings in other sports, Whitmore said.
The RPI committee released a survey to schools across the state asking for input on using the Ratings Percentage Index formula for football, soccer, volleyball, baseball and softball.
In basketball, schools must qualify for the state tournament through their district tournament. They are then seeded into state based on their RPI.
In basketball, changes to out-of-state opponents and district playoff games were made based on situations that arose in the WIAA’s inaugural season of RPI rankings — a shift from its previous draw criteria which included seeding of some schools out of a hat.
Those certainly weren’t regular .500 teams. So they were penalized for it. I was really happy to see our system did not keep Foss from winning a state championship.
WIAA RPI committee chairman Greg Whitmore
Foss won the Class 2A state boys basketball championship — but had to do so as the No. 20 school in the RPI rankings. Its RPI was impacted by losses to schools from Sacramento, Las Vegas and Phoenix during the MaxPreps Holiday Classic in California.
Those were each considered losses to .500 teams, even though they combined to finish with a record of 65-26 — and Desert Pines won Nevada’s 3A division state championship.
“Those certainly weren’t regular .500 teams,” Whitmore said. “So they were penalized for it. I was really happy to see our system did not keep Foss from winning a state championship.”
It was the same rationale for not including district tournament games.
Some tournaments have more games than others — and the WIAA didn’t want the fact that some schools play more district tournament games than others to skew the RPI. Davis of Yakima played two district games, while Eastside Catholic played seven games.
But not including district playoff games hurt the integrity of tournaments.
We saw some consolation games that were normally for seeding and schools were saying, ‘Why play these? We want schools to play those games and we want them to be meaningful.
WIAA RPI committee chairman Greg Whitmore
“We saw some consolation games that were normally for seeding and schools were saying, ‘Why play these?’ ” Whitmore said. “We want schools to play those games and we want them to be meaningful.”
This story was originally published March 28, 2017 at 6:50 PM with the headline "WIAA approves major changes to state basketball’s RPI format — and might implement in other sports."