‘No Sunday games’ rule out: Mad dash to get basketball games played by Feb. 12

After a fall sports season — where we saw things pretty much back to normal as students and communities packed back into local high school football stadiums — we have now gone backwards.

As the latest strain of COVID has swept through Tri-Valley schools, basketball and wrestling screeched to a halt, with East Bay Athletic League teams missing games and meets.

Wrestling resumed meets the week of Jan. 10, but basketball has been a whole other story.

As of Jan. 15, each team in the EBAL should have played four of their 13 scheduled league games. Due to COVID protocol, that was nowhere close to happening as teams are struggling to get games played.

Some teams have gotten in two games; even worse, there are teams that have yet to play a single EBAL game.

With the North Coast Section seeding and at-large meeting set for Feb. 13, that leaves Feb. 12 as the last day to play a league game.

If you do the math, that leaves four weeks beginning Monday, Jan. 17, to play all your league games. The California Interscholastic Federation has waived the “no games on Sunday” rule, and some teams are taking advantage of it with the Granada and Dougherty Valley boys set for a 3 p.m. game on Sunday, Jan. 23.

That leaves teams playing three to four games a week to get a full season finished. Having missed so much time in practice or games, then suddenly jumping into that many games a week, leaves players more susceptible to injury.

The teams left playing in the North Coast Section playoffs that begin the week of Feb. 14 are going to be exhausted and optimal performance will be tough to achieve.

It’s something the EBAL Athletic Directors have thought about and in a meeting on Jan. 13 there were a pair of proposals brought forth — one of which address the amount of league games to be played in the short span.

The first proposal is to play the season as scheduled, getting in as many games as possible between now and Feb. 12.

The second proposal is intriguing and sounds by far the best to me. It would call for each school to play the other nine teams in the EBAL once, accounting for nine games.

Then, all 10 teams would advance into an EBAL tournament, something not seen in a long time. There are two different tournament scenarios.

One, the bottom four seeds would have a play-in game on Saturday, Feb. 5. The two winners would then join the top six seeds in an eight-team, three-game max bracket tournament that would see games on Feb. 8, 10 and 12.

The second option would be to have the top two seeds get a bye on Feb. 8, with the other eight teams playing in the first round. The second round would still be on Thursday, Feb. 10 and the finals on Saturday, Feb. 12.

Teams eliminated early would then have the option to schedule games with other teams that lost.

If you have never seen or been part of a league tournament, they are awesome. Look at how popular March Madness is with the NCAA, and this allows to scale it down to the EBAL.

All 10 teams get the chance to advance to the postseason, something the kids carry with them through their lives. Twenty years later the athletes can say they went to the playoffs.

It would be no more than three games a week for the four-week period and teams that have gotten EBAL games thus far, would have less games to play.

After several hours of discussion and two votes, they voted to take the second option — the playoff route. I would be a proponent of having this become a fixture of the EBAL moving forward.