I would be interested in getting some information from the more knowledgeable folks on the breakdown for how the open teams are selected and seeded. Predictions are welcome as well.
As a relative newcomer San Diego seems very segmented into two approaches for scheduling. The Cathedral’s and Bishops traveling more and playing the toughest schools in the state while some of the teams have stayed mostly local and put up impressive records against lesser competition. Cathedral is the clear number 1 but how does the rest shake out and what’s the process? Thanks
Then, after the season is done the coaches meet to re-set the seedings based on arguments for a specific team moving up or down based on things like strength of schedule, quality of wins, etc.
My experience (starting in 2018 season, but as admin/team adjacent as opposed to coach), is that after the Power Rankings are set, a coach can petition to move positions based on strength of schedule or swap with a team ahead if those teams have played and the lower ranked team won.
To take your example of CCHS and TBS, CC has lost 4 games this year, all to Newport Harbor HS, who have only lost once (to CCHS). So even if (for example) La Jolla HS has more wins, CC has beaten LJ so would ordinarily take seed 1 in Open. LJ has beaten TBS 2x, so LJ with higher points and the win over TBS might take seed 2.
Seed 3 is where the negotiations kick in. Santana has had a solid season (currently sitting 3rd in power ranking points), but Bishops Strength of Schedule could put them ahead. After that, based on ranking points alone, it would be Valhalla (who just beat Santana), Helix, CCA, and then whatever happens next week among Carlsbad, Poway and TP.
breeze thanks for the more fulsome background. Feel like a 4-8 are going to be a wild bit of negotiation. Most teams in that lineup have some really clutch wins and some embarrassing losses. For example - CCA beat Carlsbad, but lost to Oceanside and Royal (!), Santana has been solid but beat by Helix who has lost to Capo Valley and Aliso Niguel, both pretty meh teams. Don’t have it mapped out but there will be some interesting cases to be made by coaches…with some ball games left to play.
I would also point out that outside Div 1/Open, only the top 12 teams in Div 2 and Div 3 are invited to post-season play, so there is occasionally some skirmishing about league winners who maybe don’t have the power ranking points, which sometimes results in adding play-in games. All Div 1 teams make the post-season because after the Open teams are pulled out of D1, the remaining teams ranked 9-20 in Div 1 are the 12 teams that make up the bracket. Byes are awarded to seeds 1-4 in each of D1, D2, and D3). More “inside baseball” can be found here: 2025 Boys Water Polo Championship Bulletin - Google Docs
Re-reviewing the Div 1 rankings/seeding possibilities (outside the three teams that everyone anticipates to be in Open):
Santana: I see only 4 losses for Santana (Yucaipa, Downey, San Juan Hills, and Valhalla–with whom they split league matches). That should make Santana at least a 4 seed.
Helix/Valhalla: these rivals have split their four matches, and each team has yet to report results from games against Granite Hills and Steele Canyon. If both V and H win out, then V should stay ahead on points and be able to prevent H from swapping them based on their H2H. They are both ahead of …
CCA/Carlsbad/Torrey Pines/Poway (ordered per CIF points, as opposed to any other reason): CCA currently has the edge among the North County Coastal league teams with the best ranking points, but two games next week will determine what happens here: Poway plays at CCA, and C-bad plays “at” Torrey Pines.
Thanks to all that have commented. One thing I noticed is that in the CIF power rankings, Bishops is way down on the fringe of Open. Obviously they are one of the best teams in the county but have taken their lumps this year. Are they in any jeopardy or are they exempt as a top 4 team?
@BWPDad, there’s no “top 4 team” exemption, and I am led to understand that some coaches specifically avoid playing each other unless they have to at a tournament. The interesting question for SDS seeding is #3 (and then again #7-8-9, but that’s a different fight with different schools).
Santana has collected points from out of county, as has TBS. But TBS gets invited to higher level events (Memorial, Elite 8, etc.) than do the other teams in SDS not named CCHS or LJHS (who get their own invites to top events as well, including Elite 8 and Roche and Newport Invite and North South etc). And at those out of county events, TBS may come home with a loss or two, which is not to say that the loss is a bad thing if the loss comes at the hands of a team that pushes you to the limit. But, the Power Rankings do not care whether the team you beat is actually good or just meh; they only care if the team you beat has a winning or losing record and by how much. So losing by 1 to a very strong SS team that finished up at 14-6 (70%) will net you 42 points, while clobbering a SS team with a 15-5 (75%) record against weaker competition will get you 50 points. Go figure. This is not a post about whether the Power Rankings system is good or bad. It is but a measuring stick with limited dimensionality.
Currently, TBS sits at 6th in Div 1, with two games to play. Today, they play CCHS and next week they play Pt Loma. After those results are posted, TBS points could move to 45.57+/-, which would put them–on Power Rankings points alone–at somewhere 6-8th. But that’s before the coaches’ meeting and the arguments for why TBS should be seeded in the top 4 (and then there’s a bit of negotiation about whether to be seeded 3 or 4). That’s my surmise, however, because (as I mentioned before) I am not a coach and am not in those meetings. I’ve just been on the school-side periphery of the results of those meetings for most of a decade (which seems like a long time until you check in with Peabody, Bowen, Atwell and a host of other coaches who’ve been at this game for what seems like several lifetimes).
Bishops MWP RIP. Has to be the worst record in 20years? Several D1 recruits and 4 national team players. Something very off there. Not the same program I remember with Peabody…
Enjoying the education, thanks everyone. I had one coach tell me that the power rankings are the standard and a team can only be moved +/- 1 spot for seeding. Is that just at the division level and doesn’t apply to open?
Caveat: Coaches in the seeding room have better info than I do.
The post-season bulletin provides: “The Commissioner’s Office will seed the top four teams (without regard to League Champions) after input from the Water Polo Advisory Committee and will determine all draws BASED ON THE CIFSDS POWER RANKINGS.” This suggests that the Committee will have input on seedings.
Moving up a spot is based on beating the team ahead. Valhalla could not win the argument that they should be ahead of Santana because those teams split their matches. Same for Helix/Valhalla. But CCA could bump Carlsbad if for whatever reason they ended up next to each other in the Power Rankings.
Final rankings won’t be available until after next Thursday when all the results are in (and at that moment, CIF might turn off access to power rankings for water polo–which they’ve done before–which is why I grab the data early).
The comments (especially @cmbreeze) have accurately described the process, but just to clarify on a couple of points, which are based upon my understanding of how the process has operated for the past decade:
(1) Open Division is entirely at the discretion of the Committee. They look at Power Rankings, sure, but it’s much more informal (and, in my view, accurate). The entire division – all eight – gets selected and seeded subjectively, not just the top four teams. That’s because there “is” no existing open division; rather, the Committee makes it up, and it’s simply a selection of the top eight teams from the top D1 teams. (CIF’s Bulletin’s are admittedly poorly worded on this point.)
(2) D1 through D3 are different. For these, there are existing divisions, and the top four teams in each division get seeded based purely on the Committee’s take (albeit with input from the Power Rankings). EVERYONE ELSE gets seeded purely based on Power Rankings, with a slight caveat that there are slight adjustments for unseeded league champions, etc.
That’s my very firm understanding of the process, albeit alongside an admission that nothing would stop the Committee from doing things differently this year than in years past. But I do not believe that is the case.
It’ll be interesting to see if CIF-SD eventually changes its playoff format to the one now used by CIF-SS.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that if a team has played over a third of their schedule against out of sections teams, then they can be manually placed in rankings to a certain degree. To seed the Open division, they usually take the top 12 teams from division 1 at the end of the regular season and manually seed the top 8 for open and the remaining teams become the 1-4 seeds for division 1.
Looks like top 3 will be CC, LJ, Bishop’s. Mid 3 Santana, Helix, Valhalla (good luck seeding them), and the bottom 4 fighting for the last two open spots: Carlsbad, CCA, Poway, Torrey Pines.
Torrey and Cbad play tomorrow as do Poway and CCA. I’m not sure Torrey gets in even if they win. Cbad should be in with a win or Poway loss. Poway is probably in with a win and Cbad loss. I think CCA is probably in win or lose.
This looks right (my caveats from above are incorporated by reference).
But I think CCA is in irrespective of their outcome against Poway, which means that the last slot could go to the winner of C-bad/TP. If C-bad wins, they’ll have points and a win over Poway, but if TP wins (with help from a CCA win) they’ll have the points and the benefit of C-bad sitting between them and Poway. Poway can sneak in with a win and help from C-bad.
In short, lots of tea leaf reading that gets sorted out by 8pm tomorrow, when the points and W-L rates are set and the teams have what they need to make their cases before the sausage making fest/seeding meeting on Saturday.
Carlsbad lost to La Jolla HS, but this game is not in the CIF data yet.
CCA was scheduled to play at La Jolla Country Day, but that may not have happened.
Points for out-of-section play should be updatable now that SS season is complete (CIF Central can play until 10/30; NCS can play until 10/31; Central Coast playoff seeding meeting is 11/3, so that suggests a 10/31 cutoff).
You guys got me going down a rabbit hole looking at the power rankings. One thing I found interesting is the game Carlsbad lost to Laguna Beach is showing as a 42 point game even though LB qualified for Open Division. Is that a mistake or a product of what Division LB was in originally?