Baseball: KHSAA moving state tournament to two-week format – Lexington Herald Leader (blog)

The KHSAA Board of Control approved a proposal to revise the schedule for the Rawlings/KHSAA State Baseball Tournament during its meeting on Wednesday. The measure moves the 16-team tournament from a one-week event to a two-week event in an effort to alleviate concerns about pitching limitations and roster depth.

The decision was spurred by research from Lawrence County baseball coach Travis Feltner, a proponent for a move to a three-class system in baseball as is used in sports like cross country and track and field. Feltner felt that the previous format made things more difficult for smaller schools in the state, whose top pitchers were more quickly exhausted and unavailable during the championship.

“I thought immediately it ruined things for smaller schools,” Feltner told the Herald-Leader earlier this year. “They no longer had a shot, absolutely no shot, at winning a state championship.”

In the revised schedule, first-round games will be played on Thursday, June 9 and on Friday, June 10. The quarterfinals will take place on Saturday, June 11.

Nearly a week will pass before the semifinals are held on Friday, June 17. The championship takes place a week after the quarterfinals on Saturday, June 18.

“Pitching limitations are in place for the health and safety of our student-athletes,” KHSAA Commissioner Julian Tackett said. “In keeping with the overall desire of the membership to maintain a 16-team format, and yet alleviate identified problems with pitching restrictions, a change in schedule was necessitated.”

The board also heard a proposal to adopt pitch-count restrictions. Currently the KHSAA imposes a 9-inning limit in one day and a 15-inning limitation in a seven-day period but enforces no pitch count. Among the recommendations for adoption are the USA Baseball Pitch Smart guidelines. Any new pitch-count rules adopted would take place at January’s meeting and go into effect for the 2016 season.

The KHSAA also approved a measure to play the team vs. team and individual singles/double state tennis competitions on separate days rather than in a single day. That change was made in response to a report from the USTA which suggested players should play no more than two full set matches in one day.

“The review of our state tennis format has been an ongoing process,” said Tackett. “We look forward to the next stage of this event and the positive impact these changes will have on this great championship.”

The process for determing regional team tennis champs was also amended to how state team champions are decided, by team vs. team play rather than an aggregate points system.