Whether you watched the entirety of the CCS Basketball Selection Show, refreshed the section’s website aggressively until brackets were posted last night or waited until the morning to see the pairings, a few conclusions can be drawn from Wednesday night’s decisions, which took over three-and-a-half hours for the committee to make.
The committee got the Open Division right
The object of the Open Division is to put the eight best teams in one bracket. Without any limitations for the number of teams coming from a specific enrollment division or league, the CCS was able to do just that by selecting seven WCAL teams and Menlo-Atherton. M-A checked off boxes that no other team could with the combination of an unbeaten league run and strong non-league schedule. Teams like Leland were largely untested in non-league play, and while Mountain View had a win over St. Mary’s-Stockton, one of the best wins for any CCS team, the Spartans had two losses late in league play. Carmel had two marquee non-league games and lost both, falling to Branson and Liberty.
The only thing missing from this modified reincarnation of the WCAL Tournament is the location of the games. All games are in the San Jose area, rather than at a location like Foothill College or Palo Alto that would be central for the WCAL instead of the entire section. The two sites in use, Fremont and Piedmont Hills, have a good history of drama, though. Fremont was the site of Palo Alto’s win over St. Ignatius last year, while Piedmont Hills has seen two #1 seeds get pushed to the brink in the first round (Mitty in 2013 and St. Francis in 2016), plus a full-court buzzer-beater (Sacred Heart Cathedral’s David Parsons in 2014).
League championships carried a lot of weight
Division IV saw perhaps the biggest surprise in seeding as Jefferson was given the fourth spot, ahead of three WBAL teams. While the Grizzlies didn’t have a particularly impressive non-league slate, aside from playing M-A close, they did win the PAL North. The WBAL champion was Eastside, from Division V.
Power leagues weren’t a sole determining factor
One of the toughest things about projecting Division I was accounting for how the seeding committee would evaluate power leagues that had stronger teams from lower divisions. Independence, Milpitas and Alvarez in Division I, as well as Wilcox in Division II and Del Mar in Division III were all placed ahead of teams from higher divisions of their power leagues. Some of those teams, such as Alvarez, had beaten teams from the higher division or had transitive wins over them, but some of the others just had stronger overall resumes.
Head-to-head results were huge
Multiple committee members had pointed out Division IV as an extremely difficult bracket to organize, even with just 12 teams. Ultimately, the deliberation clearly favored head-to-head results as Pacific Grove was seeded second, edging out Santa Cruz. The teams met in their very first game of the season, a one-point overtime win for the Breakers, which was enough to outshine Santa Cruz’s overall resume and far stronger non-league schedule that included San Leandro, Newark Memorial and Fresno-area power Immanuel.
