By Ed Piper
At this writing (Friday morning, Feb. 16, 8:13 a.m.), La Jolla's basketball team sits in the 14th place of 16 teams in the MaxPreps Division 1 rankings.
If the playoff brackets were drawn up off the data that is entered in MaxPreps right now, the Vikings (5-7 in the Western League, 12-14 overall) would travel to a place like Canyon Crest Academy in the first round of the CIF playoffs Tues., Feb. 20.
The Ravens are slotted in the third spot in Division 1 (the top eight teams in Division 1 go up to the Open Division playoffs). If and when additional information is entered into MaxPreps that affects teams' ranks between now and tomorrow's CIF seeding meeting, then these things can change.
What Coach Paul Baranowski's Vikings did by downing Kearny 57-41 in their final Western League game is improve their record and their potential seeding in the postseason tournament.
Every little bit helps. The tricky thing is that MaxPreps doesn't reveal the algorithm it uses to calculate team ratings, and, frustratingly, you can end up ranked below a team that you have previously beaten in a head-to-head game. It's not a perfect system.
What the Power Rankings system of seeding replaced was the Saturday morning free-for-all known as the seeding meetings, when coaches with magnetic personalities and the ability to pontificate could show up and plead the case for their team to be ranked higher. The higher your team's ranking, the easier the draw (opposing team), so it was worth a battle.
I haven't personally witnessed one of these meetings, but I have read and heard stories. Also, I know from experience that played out in my favor what can happen when subjective votes decide fates: My high school team finished fifth in a six-team lead, yet--bless his heart--our coach somehow got both us forwards on the all-league first team. There's no way that should have happened. (Personally, I thought my statistics showed I had the better season.)
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