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Opstad Formula Waived for 2001-2002 SeasonThe WIAA has a difficult job determining how to allocate invitations to the Districts for the State Tournament. Distance and population density determine what is possible in forming Districts, and as a result Districts vary widely in size. Some Districts, like Spokane's District 7, have only a few 3A schools, and it is not practical due to distance to merge them with another District. Other Districts, like those on the eastern, Seattle-side of Puget Sound have an ample selection of schools, but there is the need to accommodate the schools from western side of the Sound, and here bridges and ferry routes must be considered when creating Districts. In recent years, the WIAA used the Opstad formula to determine how many schools from each District would be invited to the State championships. This formula computes two numbers, and then uses the average of the two to set the number of invitations. One number is called the "school factor", and it is the number of invites that would be issued if the invitations were distributed to Districts based on the number of schools within each District. This year, for example, there are seventy-nine 3A schools, so a district like Yakima's District 5 with 8 schools would get a little more than one-tenth (8/79) of the total number of State Entries based on the "school factor." (The proportion is actual 10.1%.) The second number is the "enrollment factor", and this is the number of entries that a District would get if the entries were distributed based on enrollment. The total enrollment of 10th, 11th and 12th graders in 3A schools is 70016, and so Yakima with 7308 students would again get a bit more than one tenth of the total number of entries (actually, this proportion is 10.4%.) Things get messy because the proportional factors when applied to the total number of entries to the State event almost never result in nice round integers. For example, in the current State 3A Volleyball Championship, there are 16 entries total, and based on the school factor, Yakima should have 1.62 entries, and based on the enrollment factor it should have 1.67 entries. The obvious solution is to round to the nearest integer. Since both numbers round up to 2, this leads to the same result. But this isn't the case for all the Districts. The table below shows the invitations and Opstad factors for the six Districts that are sending teams to the State 3A Championship. Notice that District 3 has a school factor of 3.44, and a population factor of 3.52. So based on the number of schools and rounding to the nearest integer, it should have 3 entries, but based on the number of students, it should have 4 entries (rounding up.)
Perhaps because the two different approaches yield different answers, the WIAA this year has made the following cryptic annotation to Rule 4.11.0 Opstad Formula:
The result of their decision is that the 15,408 students of District 3 (actually the number is quite a lot larger because most of the schools include a 9th grade,) have far less access to the State Championships than students in some other Districts. The table below repeats some of the descriptive data above and shows the number of students and the number of schools represented by each State invitation for the six districts. Note that a State invitation in District 7 represents 3113 students and 4 schools, while the invitations extended to District 3 each represent 5136 students and 5.7 schools.
This inequality is likely to create some friction for a variety of sports in addition to volleyball. For some sports, like volleyball or basketball, one simple solution would be to link the bottom seed finishers in the over-represented Districts into "pigtail" matches with additional seeds in other underrepresented Districts. For example, pigtail a fourth entry from District 3 with the 5th seed from District 2. Or give District 3 the fourth entry outright, and play a pigtail between District 5 seed 2 and the District 7 seed. This issue will appear again and again in the course of the year, and it would be wise to address it now. One other point. District 3 is the West Central District, which holds its Championships on Saturday, Nov. 3rd, at Fife High School.
WIAA Enrollment DataIt is not easy figuring out what to do, but you might like to look at the actual school enrollment data for Washington's 3A schools from the WIAA web site to see the difficulties involved.
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