This season, the OHSAA is looking to change the landscape of the Boys Ice Hockey State Tournament.

Dr. John Kronour took over the job as the Administrator for Boys Ice Hockey around the first of April this year, and started to get to work on how he could change the tournament for the better.

“[The goal] was to try to stop having major mismatches in the regional hockey tournament where a 17 seed would play a 1 seed,” said Kronour.

“The suggestion that came out was to create a double bye system for the top 4 seeds, so that they would get two byes. The 9-16 seeds would play each other in the first round, and then play 5-8 [in the second round].”

None of this has been approved by the OHSAA Board of Directors, however, he had shared the idea with the board at a work session they had last month and did not get any concerns raised at that point. Dr. Kronour says he is making the proposal to the board at their October meetings at the end of the month and that he doesn’t anticipate many concerns.

In order to do this, Dr. Kronour says that they would have to move some teams around in order to balance out the four regions.

The Sylvania regional, as of right now, only has 10 teams to its name, this is way less compared to the 20, 18, and 17 in the Columbus, Brooklyn, and Kent regionals, respectively. Kronour is looking at moving a few teams from the Columbus region and the Brooklyn region to be able to balance those that are around 16-18 teams.

Dr. Kronour acknowledges that this is a big change, but one that has to be made. In the past, coaches have voted on their seeds to determine their place in the bracket. This has sometimes created some uneven matchups for some teams in the earlier rounds.

Within the proposed plan, instead of choosing their own seeds, coaches will be reporting their scores to MaxPreps and MaxPreps will configure the bracket. This is similar to what is done by the Ohio Club High School Hockey teams. Those teams that are in the USA Hockey High School division will report their scores to MYHockey Rankings, and their ranking will determine their seed in the Buckeye Cup, their state tournament.

These changes will hopefully make that first round more competitive and less of a topic of controversy that has been going on for a while around the high school hockey community.

There have been multiple accounts of lopsided second round games, the round where the lower seeds start to play the teams with byes.

An example of this is last season’s 2nd round matchup between #2 St. Charles and #20 Elder, the last seeded team in the Columbus Regional. The game ended in the middle of the second period due to mercy rule at 16-0, a game that resulted in the shots being 81-0, according to the Elder website and St. Charles X (Twitter).

“We try to take the input of the coaches association to listen to the input and the feedback that they have on the tournament. And then if we get opportunities to approve it, then that’s obviously what we would like to do.”