Yes. That is true but looking at it that way doesn’t answer the question of which zone is harder to qualify for. The best non-qualifier for PSW likely wouldn’t have qualified in SPA. They weren’t good enough to qualify in PSW or SPA. The reverse is also true. The best non-qualifier from SPA also wasn’t good enough to qualify in PSW or SPA.
Having all teams on the not-good-enough side of the line doesn’t establish where the line is, only that it is somewhere better than the PSW and SPA non-qualifiers. To find the line requires looking at the last team in.
Would the bottom qualifier in a SPA age group still have qualified if they had been in PSW? Would the bottom qualifier in SPA have been able to beat one of the PSW qualifiers in order to take their spot? Mostly, the answer to that question is no. The reverse is not true. In most age groups, the bottom PSW qualifier is good enough that had they been in SPA Quals, they would have been able to beat at least one of the SPA teams to have taken their spot in Championship.
Marco, I think the obvious tiebreaker would be to see where additional allocations should go, unless of course you think that these zones should have even fewer teams in the 48 team Championship bracket. The answer is clear- almost all additional allocations should go to SPA as I wrote in the previous post. Anyway, i do not care much about the topic one way or another. I just do not understand how you came to your conclusion- that’s all
My general feeling is that many kids have too much water polo these days. It would be great to have a 2-3 weeks break after the JOs but many, especially in NorCal, cannot do it since hs practices starting next week or maybe a week later.
Same with adults. I have taken my kiddo to NYC today (Central Park, Metropolitan Museum, good food) and still ended up writing some boring nonsense on this board
One observation over the years is the rich get richer. If you get a high seed, you are rewarded with opponents you can rest your starters against, and you play 7 games, rather than 11. Even if another team is even with the high seeded team on ability, playing 4 more games and not resting starters puts the challenger in a tough spot, playing against fresh legs. I think there should be a reward for a high seed, but those 2 factors mean it’s tough to knock a team off the perch if their last year team finished on the podium.
In NFL, probably the best sport for parity where any team can win, the lower finishers get the rewards in draft picks, so the next year, once again, any team can win.
Does it make sense to give prior year winning teams such a dynasty advantage?
Day 1 blowouts are unavoidable when there are 48 teams in Championship bracket as discussed above.
Day 2 for even high seeded teams can be really rough. In 12U Mission faltered against Stanford and wound up having to play 9 games to win the title.
Day 3 had them play 3 games, the last of which was against the #1 ranked team by general consensus.
So the #2 seed played 9 games to take the title against the #1 seed going through other top ranked teams (Vanguard, etc).
Yes the rich get richer because good coaching builds good teams. The good coaches will attract good talent and families that want the same thing (high level competition). There might be slight exceptions if coaches shuffle around but even with Coach changes one might expect consistency from the club leadership.
