Congrats to Camron Rust

[Smitty]

For Oregon, there's a 2-phased approach to voting for a tourney bid. First there is a vote among all the "Regular" membership of the association. There are 3 types of members: Probationary, Associate, and Regular. Once you achieve Regular status, you are eligible to work varsity. To get to be a Regular member, you either get awarded it by the comissioner if he thinks you're ready, or you automatically get it after 5 years in the association.

All Regular members get to vote for who gets to go to the tourney from the entire list of Regular members. Someone will correct me, but I think you get to vote for up to 25 members in the first vote. Then the top 70 are put on the second ballot. Of those 70, the Regular members then get to vote for at least 10 but no more than 15 (I think). At this point, the varsity coaches all get to vote as well. Here's where it gets fishy. From all those votes, the coaches votes are counted as 1 point each. And a Regular member vote counts as some percentage of one vote. It's based on how many of each types of votes there are (there are always a lot more Regular member votes than coaches votes). It's disturbing that coaches votes count for so much more than the association (peer) votes. Usually only the better school's coaches vote regularly (since they are the ones more likely to even get to the state tourney) and not everyone gets to work at those better schools, so the coaches votes can be very skewed. This makes it difficult for up-and-comers to break into the state tourney.

I had always been against the votes counting differently - I think all the votes should count as 1 point - forget the percentages. It's been a point of contention in the association. The old timers and top echelon want to keep it the way it is because they benefit from it. But the up-and-comers see it as unfair. Who knows if it will ever change.

Camron can explain the process in more detail as to how the percentage for membership votes gets determined. That's it in a nutshell, though.