It's time to seed the NWAACC tournament

Tacoma head coach Carl Howell and assistant RJay Barsh celebrate the 2012 NWAACC title.

KENNEWICK, WASH. - In the hours following Tacoma Community College’s NWAACC championship, a number of tournament volunteers, the executive director, and even an official could all be seen out together at one of the local restaurants, celebrating another successful year. Several minutes into the festivities, a man wearing a shimmering, dark blue suit and flashy ring sauntered through the doors, his normally grim face split with a smile when he acknowledged the cheers and applause from all those that recognized him.

            The man, who had a group of young men in tow, was none other than Carl Howell, the head coach of the NWAACC champion Tacoma Titans. He walked down the table of volunteers, shaking hands with many until he reached executive director Marco Azurdia, where he stopped to exchange a few words before making his way to another corner of the establishment where his team and assistant coaches as well as his wife and son awaited him.

Tacoma head coach Carl Howell

            It wasn’t until after the hubbub had subsided that there was enough of a pause in the maelstrom for a quick word of congratulation to the champion coach, who had gone exactly ten years between titles. Talk quickly turned to the set of power rankings that I write every two weeks, and how Howell appreciated the consideration of his team in the rankings. Then Howell said something I didn’t expect, but something that got me thinking.

            What Howell mentioned was that it may be time to seed the tournament, and not in the way it is now. The current format pits the Northern region against the Southern Region and the East against the West. The top finisher in one region takes on the fourth place finisher in the other, and the second place team takes on the third place squad.

            In a perfect world, that should seed the tournament equally. The opponent in the first round of the tournament is solely based on how a team performed in the regular season. However, the world isn’t perfect. The wrench that is thrown into this system is that the regions are far from equal, and so in some cases, the team that took fourth in the East may actually be better than the team that won the West.

            That disparity is painfully obvious on the women’s side, enough that several league officials said they weren’t at all surprised when seven of the eight teams from the Northern and Western regions were beaten on the first day, only to see the remaining team lose on the following day.

            The method to fix this broken system is simple, and it’s already used at the college level for the NCAA basketball tournaments. What happens is that the winner of most of the conferences gets an automatic bid to the tournament. The rest of the bids are called “at-large bids” and are chosen by a selection committee. The committee is made up of athletic directors and conference commissioners from across the country, and they decide which teams are the most deserving to receive an invitation to the NCAA tournament.

Tacoma Guard Mark McLaughin

            Gone would be the East vs. West days, it would be a system exactly like the NCAA where the first seed would play the 16^th and so on. It wouldn’t matter which region a team came from, it would matter how good that team actually was.

            The problem with that system is that it is subjective to the people sitting on the committee, and it is entirely up to them to decide who gets in and who doesn’t. Once the teams are chosen, coaches, players and fans alike would argue that their team deserved a higher seed than they were given. It’s not based solely on wins and losses, and so the ambiguity of the selection would unsettle some until the system had time to take hold.

            Despite its drawbacks, a system like this should effectively eliminate the imbalance between the conferences. Because it would be in accordance to rankings and not records, there wouldn’t be as many first round match ups that pitted two top eight teams against one another. Sure, there would still be plenty of Cinderella moments, such as this year when the Clark and Whatcom men were both ranked No. 1 and lost in the first round. That’s just basketball. But it would mean that the sixteen best teams would get in to the tournament, instead of a good team being left at home because they finished fifth in the best region in the league.     

            At the end of the day, this system works. A champion is crowned every year and there aren’t too many complaints about how it works. That said, as the league continues to try to grow in popularity, they may need to make the switch to a format that people are used to and understand. Besides, people could start having selection Sunday parties.

Oh, How I've missed basketball

Clackamas Sophomore Andre Dickson (center, in white) looks to
score during practice on Nov. 21. Dickson had a game high four
steals in last week's season opener verses Linfield University JV.

After I finished classes today, I went to get some photos for one of my writers that was doing a preview of the CCC men's basketball season. I didn't think much of it. It was just a few photos of practice. Quick and easy, in and out.

When I got there, I realized that I'd be staying a lot longer than I planned.

I'd forgotten exactly how much I loved the sport of basketball. Lately I've gotten really in to volleyball and I've always been a soccer lover, but it wasn't until I stepped back on to the basketball court that I remembered how much I've missed it since the season ended so many months ago.

The next few minutes were lost to the squeak of sneakers, the pounding of the ball, the swish of the net and the click of the camera. It's more than easy to be absorbed in the action, it's practically intoxicating.

Then after a few minutes, I came down to earth. I realized that part of the reason I'd missed basketball so much was because there really is less of it now then there was a year ago. Last November, the Rose Garden would pack with 20,000 fans a few times a week to watch the Portland Trailblazers play. This November, the action on ESPN isn't on the court, it's IN court.

That might just be because the NBA isn't just basketball anymore. It's a business. And to be fair, it's a really good business. They attract millions of fans worldwide with their talent and the entertainment that it provides and rake in billions of dollars in ticket sales, TV deals and merchandise.

Clackamas freshman Jake Dewit (12) and Matt Bryant collide 

during practice on Nov. 21 in Randall Hall. Bryant had a 

double double in last week's game against Linfield JV with 12 
points and game high 14 rebounds. Dewit scored five points 

and drew the season's first charge.

For that very reason, many basketball fans shun the NBA, claiming that it's too flashy and has gotten away from the pure sport that it used to be. Most of those fans choose to follow the NCAA, where all the athletes (depending on how you see it) are amateurs. At that level, the athletes are still largely moldable and they depend  more on their coach to teach than do the pros.

However, even at the NCAA level, the game can still be muddled by money. You don't have to dig very far before you find a case of a recruiting scandal. The reason for those? Money. Better players means more success, translating to better attendance and increased revenue for the college that the team is affiliated with.

In order to escape that, you might have to go one level down, where money means even less. That's where small college basketball comes in to play. At Clackamas Community College, for example, the stands would seat only about 1000 people if completely full, which they never really are. And that's only if they open up each set of bleachers, something that only happens for graduation.

In a situation like that, the revenue for filling the stands wouldn't be a huge difference in the athletic department's budget. The benefit from having a successful team is simply that they win more. Winning calls the attention of prospective players, feeding the success of the program even further. That's as it should be. The sport is focused on the players, not the coaches, not the fans and certainly not on money. Just basketball.

Soccer a 'goal' with soccer city, USA

It wasn’t long ago that nobody cared about soccer. And in fact, in much of the country that’s still the case.

Hatred of soccer can be attributed to many different factors. Not the least of those is that Americans simply like to be the best at everything. We’re basically the only people that play American Football (except for the Canadians, but who really counts them?). The United States absolutely dominates everyone at basketball. and while Japan and the Dominican Republic have made strides with baseball, they still lag behind.Americans are rabid fans of all those sports and why not? We invented them, after all.

That story is different with soccer. Soccer originated in Europe, taking on European rules and ideals, which differ greatly from what the US is used to. Americans are king of the quick-fix. Examples: microwaves, drive through restaurants and diet pills. Instant gratification is built into our brains and if something isn’t exciting right away, we quickly find it boring and return to something else.

That’s why soccer doesn’t work. Soccer is a long, low-scoring game. There is plenty of drama and action, but little to ‘show’ for it. Americans like scores that are easy to grasp with numbers in the tens and hundreds that show the flow of the game and make it simple to understand what happened. Soccer can be the complete opposite. Two teams can battle defensively and score in the 90^th minute, or a team can put in a goal inside the 1^st minute and will be held scoreless the rest of the game.

The ‘slow’ pace is combined with the idea that soccer players are whiners, fakers and generally overdramatic. Anybody who has youtubed professional soccer will know that there are plenty of examples of players bumping wrists and falling to the ground holding their ankles. The truth is, the sport of soccer doesn’t allow time to stop for players to state their case to the officials, so they often have to over exaggerate things in order to get the attention of the referee. Americans dismiss that as softness, opting for the more ‘masculine’ sport of football, where the players are covered in protective pads from head to toe.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love football. I just happen to be from Portland, where we’re a little different than the rest of the country.

Portland is a place where soccer has not only scraped a living, it has thrived. Dating back further than the early 1920s, when a local team was rumored to have played sailors from a British freighter, soccer gained a foothold in the area’s culture. We’re a city where we like things with a distinct European twinge. We like scarves (even during the summer), we like the rain, we like being green and face it: we like soccer.

While the most visible representation of soccer fever is the Timbers, whose jump to Major League Soccer sparked an even larger and more rabid following than before, the soccer movement can be seen at all levels of the game, starting with youth sports.

Over the past decade or so, soccer has become the most popular sport for children to play, eclipsing youth football, basketball, and even little-league baseball. Much of that success can be attributed to the simplicity of the sport at the youth level. Soccer involves kicking a ball, while baseball, basketball and football require more practice and more skill to get the basics of dribbling, passing and hitting down.

Add in that football is expensive and dangerous, it rains too much in the northwest to play baseball year round and basketball requires a hoop to make it fun and you get why soccer has done so well here: It’s an inexpensive, low-contact sport that can be played anywhere that there is enough grassy space to kick the ball.

With the large fan base a strong pool of talent, soccer has made leaps and bounds in the region. In 2002 and 2005, the University of Portland women’s program won the NCAA championship and since has produced four current members of the US national team, including star Megan Rapinoe. Even closer to home, the Clackamas Community College women’s team took back to back NWAAC titles in 2004-05 and another in 2007, while winning the Southern Region five times since 2002.

Now it makes sense why the University of Portland Pilots are a national women’s soccer power. Now it makes sense why Jeld-Wen stadium fills to the brim every time that the Timbers play, or the US Women’s National Team visits. Soccer is part of our culture here. It’s in our blood. It’s been built from the ground up, and isn’t likely to fade any time soon.