Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Rookie
Here on the Left Coast in the Golden Bear State, Playoffs are broken down as two separate tournaments:
1) Sectional, There are numerous geographic sections throughout the state and each holds a tournament. Officials assigned by a coordinator appointed by the commish.
2) State , North vs South ,state divided whereby the winners of each class would face off for the state championship. State Coordinator and their Committee make officials assignment. Coordinator appointed by CIF.
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A little more detail:
Section playoffs is the first step. Teams qualify based upon regular season league play and some sections also use the maxpreps rankings for at-large qualifiers. Each Section does this stage a little differently. For example, some Sections have an Open division while others just stick with D1, D2, D3, etc. Each Section gets to send a certain number of teams on to Regionals. This is based upon how many schools are in the Section.
There are 13 Sections.
Following Sections, teams qualify for either NorCal or SoCal Regionals. At this stage the CIF central office takes over the tournament. It seeds the teams and makes the brackets. The winners of these brackets face each other in the State Finals, so each championship game is North v South. There are different levels for the schools to compete in: Open, D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, & D6. D6 may just end with the Regional Final and not have a State Final.
Officials: At the Sectional level the officials are handled by each Section. They are free to do this however they wish. Brackets can range from 32 teams, 16 teams, to only 8 or somewhere in between. I don't think that there are brackets bigger than 32 anymore, but the Southern Section used to have a couple of 48 team brackets a few years ago. Most Sections have the local area assignors cover the home games played in their territory during the early rounds. Once the teams reach the semifinals or Sectional Finals, the folks in the Section office put crews on the games who may involve officials from different local associations within the Section. For example, if a section has two associations during the season which break the territory up into North and South, those groups will cover the early games with their guys, but then could find themselves working on a crew with officials from the other group for the last round or two.
NorCals/SoCals: The local officials associations nominate a certain number of officials to the CIF office. The office then takes these officials and makes crews out of them from each Section. Most of the time these crews work Regional contests with teams from other sections, however once in a while a crew will see a team from their home section. The officials are told prior to the start of regionals how many early round contests they are pre-selected to work--1, 2, or 3. The CIF office staff makes this choice. The officials are then awarded Regional Finals based upon what the CIF staff observes.
State Finals:
The State Championship crews are selected from the Regional Final crews.