The Legislative Council met on Thursday. (Ryan Casey/CHSAANow.com)
AURORA — The new RPI-based system for postseason qualification was passed by all team sports committees who presented reports at the Legislative Council on Thursday.
It will go into widespread effect with the 2016-17 school year, but will get its official start with the baseball season this spring.
“After looking at past results and evaluating the data of previous years, it’s definitely the way to go,” said Eddie Hartnett, the athletic director at Boulder who is the president of CHSAA’s Board of Directors. “It’s progressive, it’s going to be more fair.
“The formula is transparent, and anyone can look at it and understand it — whether it’s a student, a parent, a coach, or an athletic director,” Hartnett added. “It doesn’t have to be, ‘Well, there’s some magic formula out there that nobody understands.’ And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to be transparent with the entire membership.”
The RPI (Rating Percentage Index) system will give postseason qualification a similar approach across the board. It is also an objective way to select teams that make the bracket, as it is a formula which weights the relative strength of teams in each classification.
The specific formula to be used will be comprised of 25 percent of a team’s winning percentage, 50 percent of the winning percentage of a team’s opponents, and 25 percent of the winning percentage of the opponents of a team’s opponents.
The RPI system was a mandate that came from CHSAA’s Board of Directors in August. That group was acting on a which from the membership to standardize the way of approaching the postseason across all team sports. (Full details of the RPI system, including a list of answers to frequently asked questions, is available here.)
Starting with baseball’s season this spring, all RPI data will be posted on CHSAANow.com. A quick reference to that data will be linked from CHSAARPI.com. The plan is to have those data feeds update nightly.
Baseball’s desire to move away from the much-maligned Wild Card points was so strong that the committee recommended the immediate move to the RPI this spring.
Originally, the committee also recommended not counting out-of-state games, but changed its position prior to the Legislative Council meeting. The result was a vote which split the use of RPI in baseball into two questions: Should the RPI be used this spring? And should out-of-state games count?
On the first question, the answer was an overwhelming Yes. Seventy-six percent of the Legislative Council voted in favor of moving on RPI.
But the Council also voted to include out-of-state games in the formula. And that fact likely helped the immediate use of RPI pass on Thursday.
The RPI system also replaces Wild Card points in football, which have been used for a number of years. It replaces various other systems in field hockey, soccer, softball and volleyball.
Football’s RPI system will use a modified for account for classification. All other sports will not.
Ultimately, the approval process went very smoothly across the board.
“The reason why it went smooth today, there wasn’t a lot of resistance, or there weren’t a lot of questions or concerns, is that people felt empowered to address that situation for a long period of time,” Hartnett said. “Committees went out, educated people. Change is scary, and in the beginning I think people were afraid of change, but as we educated the population and said, ‘This is where we want to go for the future, and this is going to work,’ the membership’s trusting us to give it a try.”
RPI still needs to be approved by basketball, hockey and lacrosse at the April Legislative Council.