The road to the South Dakota State High School Baseball Tournament in 2018 will take a slightly different route.
Both the Class A and Class B tournament formats have been remodeled, with Class A no longer using the same region format, while Class B is expanding its state tournament field to eight teams.
South Dakota High School Baseball Association Executive Director Dane Yde said the impetus for making the change came from the coaches in both divisions who were eager to improve the postseason formats.
“We don’t want to be making too many changes but we felt like these made a lot of sense for our teams,” Yde said. “We got a lot of feedback from coaches and with this format, you really do have a true representation and to try to qualify the best teams for the state tournament.”
In Class A, the region format has been pushed aside in favor of seeding the teams 1-through-16 during the regular season. Once the playoffs start, the 16 teams will be split into four pods to play out the region round, with the four winners advancing to Sioux Falls for the state tournament on Memorial Day weekend in May. The top-four seeds during the regular season will host the regionals, which will not be geographically based.
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For example, the No. 1 seed will host the No. 16 seed and the No. 8 and No. 9 teams will also play at the same site. The opening-round winners will advance to the region final the same day, with the winner advancing to the state tournament. The regions won’t take geography into account, meaning a top-seeded Mitchell team could host Rapid City Stevens, Harrisburg and Watertown in the regional.
Class A will adopt the exact same seed-point formula that is used in high school football, volleyball and basketball by the South Dakota High School Activities Association for the regular season. That format assigns a value for a win or loss based on the opponent’s winning percentage.
Yde said the updated Class A format helps to fix concerns about teams floating from one region to another due to the changing number of teams participating on a year basis. Mitchell, for example, was one of those teams and in recent years, has competed in the west, south or east regions, depending on what teams were participating in a given year.
Class A teams will need to play at least 12 games during the regular season and can’t play a single team more than four times.
Class B state expands to eight In the Class B ranks, the SDHSBA will continue to use four regions but will re-seed the regions at the super-regional round, or when four teams are left in each region. Both qualifiers in the region championship will advance to the state tournament, sending eight teams to Sioux Falls.
With the change, the state tournament will expand to two days, starting on Memorial Day Monday (May 28) with the quarterfinals and continuing with the state semifinals and championship on Tuesday (May 29).
Yde said 80 percent of the Class B coaches polled after the 2017 season were in favor of expanding to eight teams at the state tournament.
The state tournament will not be seeded and will continue to be pre-slotted depending on region and a team’s finish in the region tournament. Region winners will face a region runner-up from another region. The seed-point formula modeled off the SDHSAA format will not be used for Class B.
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“In every single region, there was some really good teams that would have been a good representative from their region that were left out,” Yde said, referencing the 2017 state tournament. “We were really missing out on a chance to really have a good Class B tournament with more teams involved.”
Another change that will take place is limiting South Dakota high school teams to only playing other high school squads, which eliminate teams playing Legion teams during the spring season or other traveling teams. The new rule will still allow games against out-of-state teams, provided they are also high school-level competition.
“For us, it’s about promoting our own product and trying to build excitement for high school baseball,” Yde said. “Maybe we can get some teams that are on the fence and get them to come in the fold and be a part of what we’re doing. We feel like it’s only going to enhance our product.”
On a local level, two changes are occurring with local teams. Howard will now have its own high school team, while Woonsocket, Wessington Springs and Sanborn Central will form their own team this year, after participating as part of the Central Dakota Area co-op last year.
