Movin' deck chairs

 I get where the IHSAA is coming from here. I think.

Maybe.

They're trying to gin up March again, see, and so this week they unveiled a major change to the Indiana high school basketball tournament. Beginning next year, the two-game regional will go back to being a one-game regional, as it was when class buckets first came in. And the semistate, now a one-game affair, will become a four-team, all-day event, with a secondary draw after the regional round to spice things up.

The idea is to get everyone ramped up for the last two rounds of the tournament. And also to give sectional winners a breather of sorts after a multi-game sectional.

I get that.

I think.

Maybe.

Of course, what I also get is what legendary Anderson Madison Heights coach Phil Buck told me one time when his Pirates were preparing for the regional.

I asked him something about how tough it was to play two hard games in one day, and Buck just laughed.

"Ah, Benny," he said (Buck being one of the few people who could get away with calling me "Benny"). "These kids play eight hours a day outside in the hot sun in the summertime. This is nothin'."

And that's doubly true today, with more and more kids attending basketball camps in the summer and getting sucked into the voracious maw of AAU ball. Two games in a day? 

It is, as Buck said, nothin'. Especially when it's been a full week between sectional Saturday and regional Saturday.

So that rationale falls flat.

Of course, falling equally flat is the counter-argument to the changes, which is that swapping out the all-day regional for an all-day semistate will mean more travel expense for parents and fans.

Problem with that is, the advent of class hoops has meant even sectionals are no longer as local as they used to be. And the regional round?

Well, this past year, the winners of our "local" sectionals already had to travel a bit for regional play. Sectional winners locally had to travel to Triton and Frankfort in Class A; in 2A, to North Judson from as far away as Bluffton; in 3A, to New Castle from as far away as Garrett and Wawasee; and in 4A, to Logansport from as far away as DeKalb.

Not sure how much more travel we're talking about for a semistate. If any.

So, fine. If the IHSAA thinks this will give the tournament a better contour -- everything building organically toward the state finals -- so be it. But you get right down to it, the changes amount to little more than moving deck chairs around on the Titanic.

OK. So bad analogy.