High School Tournament Seeding Process

I was able to assist my wife at work. Something I highly recommend to any spouse out there - go see them in action at their day job. Things that are simple to us may confound them (and vice versa). My wife is a High School Athletic Director. The high school hosts a girls basketball tournament (with teams that her school is not part of - for the sake of evening the home court advantage bit).

You ever wonder how they come up with the seedings? For those of you who may have no idea what I'm talking about, seeding is how teams are ranked relative to their competition within a tournament group. So how does it work? You figure they go by the record, rank the teams, assign the seeds, set up the games and go, right? Yeah, that's what I thought too... boy was I off.

Let's use 14 teams as an example. There will be 16 slots and 2 first round byes (auto advances to the next round without having to play a game in the first round). 8 first round games, 4 second round, 2 third round games, then a final... With me so far?

So let's start with the seeding. First, the 14 teams come together in the same room and put their records on the wall. Here's where everything I thought went out the window. For the sake of simplicity, I'll number the things that were new to me:

(1) The records are broken out by division - makes sense in hindsight, but something I never thought about (we were 1-2 against division 1, 3-2 against division 2 teams, etc) then the total record - by the way, some coaches aren't so good at math... : )
(2) Each team then says a blurb about themselves to justify their record, or explain issues, or promote themselves. I was hysterically amused by the coach who said "We're 2 and 12, that pretty much says it all (they ended up with the 13th seed).
(3) Then they vote for each seed. First for the 1 seed - each coach writes down their vote, hands it in, then each is written, tallied (that was my job) and totaled. Whoever gets the most votes gets the seed. Ties are revoted on, then a coin toss if the tie continues (OHSAA rules here).

Now where were we - oh right, I was contributing. I can count to 14. Go ME!

(4) Then once the seeding is done, they have go bracket up! Again I figured it was a 1 and 2 seeds get the bye, 3 plays the worst seed, etc - like in the NCAA tourney. Not so much. Each team (in order) picks their spot (open lines in the bracket).
(5) and the best teams don't always pick the bye slots! Astounding!!! Apparently some teams don't want to get rusty. Others want to make sure they don't have to play against certain teams that give them trouble and put themselved in different parts of the bracket.

Eventually, everyone had a position, the brackets were set, and we braved the cold home. Wow - what a bunch of new twists to what I thought I knew about that little superscript number next to the team name on the bracket.