I couldn't help but speak out one more time about the seeding process for ECC.

The Puget Sound Region started a power or ranking league last year and continued it under a slightly improved version this, its second year.

The main purposes of the power league are:

1. to provide the best possible method of ranking teams in a linear fashion through direct competition on the volleyball court;

2. to provide even and challenging competition with every match from the first to the fifth of a day of competition;

3. to provide accurate seeding into the regional tournament and establish the top X number of teams eligible to compete for our bids to the JO championship;

4. to attract top teams from outside our region to participate and thereby benefit our region's team through increased competition; and

5. to Minimize complaints and Ranking Controversy, I can see that purpose hasn't been realized yet.


Now it is my firm belief that the power league structure is the single best method of establishing a linear ranking of teams within the league through direct competition on the court. At the end of the day, nobody is complaining that they deserved to have finished somewhere other than where they actually finished through their own performance that day.

The reason that you use the rankings from a power league over the various "my team beat Team A in Feb and we beat Team B in January" arguments is that you are trying to seed a field of teams that are very diverse, from diferent parts of the country, and in our case, different parts of our hemisphere.

The beauty of the ranking leagues or power leagues is that the standings are based on performance over many matches against a diverse field of opponents. Head to head results are useful if you are setting up home court advantage between those two teams, but not for seeding a diverse field of teams.

It is my strong belief that any ranking that does not respect the ranking of a region's power league is difficult to defend. The challenge becomes seeding the teams from different regions. Because of the power leagues, the ranking within the regions is already done for you.

There is virtually no reference to head to head results being used in the seeding of ECC. It is seeded using almost exclusively the power league rankings from the different regions that have them.

BTW, NW Jrs 15s finished the final rankings in the PSR power league in the #11 position...

This is behind ECC-entered teams: WVBA 16, Olympia 16-1, KJ 16 Baden, WVBA 15, SIVBC 16, PSVBC 16, PSVBC 15, Edmonds Elite 16, and Capital 15 Ice. For ECC they were seeded ahead of Edmonds Elite 16 and Capital 15, who they finished behind in the final rankings of Power Leauge.

So...Coach J, do you still think they were unfairly seeded?