James Hillis provides our readers with comments on the recent CIS tournament proposal outlined by Bill Malley.
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Mr. Malley:
I am responding to your post regarding the proposed modifications to the national championship format as president of the NABCC. We appreciate your interest and welcome constructive feedback including ideas about how to make our game better in all aspects.
Your post and idea for a modification to the national championship in Men’s basketball is based upon a flawed premise that there are six conferences in the CIS. In actual fact, there are four conferences or Regional Associations in the CIS: CWUAA ("Canada West"), OUA ("Ontario"), QSSF ("Quebec"), and AUS ("Atlantic Canada"). Each Regional Associations makes their own individual decision about how to best split their teams for their own competitive objectives. These splits form competitive divisions within the Regional Associations. The fact that the OUA has maintained a berth for the OUA West division champion is a decision made at the OUA level.
CIS has assigned two berths to the OUA for them to partition out via their playoff format. In Canada West, there is no berth automatically assigned to a division champion. This was true when CWUAA had three divisions (GPAC, Central and Pacific) and remains the same now that the CWUAA has realigned into two divisions, Prairie and Pacific.
At one point in time their were six conferences. Canada West, GPAC, Ontario West, Ontario East, Quebec and Atlantic were what we were all familiar and comfortable with. Things however have changed and it is within the new Regional Association framework that any new formats must work. The CIS has also expressed a strong desire to maintain a host in any model going forward.
The relative merits of the Regional Association model versus the old conference model is not for the NABCC to debate. It is within those parameters that a revised tournament format has been architected. Two models were put forward by the NABCC to the CIS sport committee for an expansion of the national championship format. Sport committee, in conjunction with the marketing committee makes an initial decision which then goes forward as a recommendation to the general membership to vote on the motion. Sport committee enthusiastically endorsed the three regional model feeding into a Final 8 tournament.
The three-regional-into-eight-team format also supports and highlights the importance of the Regional Association Championship games and tournaments. The Champion goes through directly to the Final 8 weekend, others must qualify through the regionals.
The comments about financing and referee neutrality and travel are simply incorrect. These points were all addressed in the proposal.
James Hillis,
Head Coach, University of Regina
President, NABCC
2 comments:
If the AUS will be the host of CIS nationals for the foreseeable future than why would they need a "host" berth?
Given the proximity of the member teams to Halifax...five teams are located in Nova Scotia...who would get a "host" berth?
Perhaps the winner of the AUS championship game would get the automatic birth and the loser of the AUS championship would get the host birth. That could be a team from NS, NB, PEI or Nfld.
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