The PSAL girls basketball seeding committee didn’t use the correct criteria Saturday when it met to decide the Class AA playoff bracket, league director Donald Douglas said in a Thursday e-mail to administrators from the three reseeded schools, Francis Lewis athletic director Arnie Rosenbaum told The Post. South Shore coach Anwar Gladden reiterated that Douglas told him and two of his principals the same thing on a conference call Friday.
Responding to an appeal by the Francis Lewis administration, Douglas formed a separate independent committee which resulted Thursday in Lewis being moved from No. 4 to No. 2, South Shore sliding to No. 4 from No. 3 and John F. Kennedy bumping down to No. 3 from No. 2. Those new seedings were reflected on the league’s official site, PSAL.org, on Friday.
Gladden said Douglas explained that the original committee took into account that his star player, Jasmine Odom, had not played in South Shore’s loss to Francis Lewis on Jan. 22. The new committee and Douglas, Gladden said, determined that fact should not have played so heavily into the seeding decision.
Douglas said on the conference call that a similar thing happened in a controversial seeding after the 2007-08 season and that the PSAL is working on taking steps to prevent this from happening in the future.
Douglas declined comment Thursday afternoon and referred all questions to Department of Education spokeswoman Margie Feinberg, who didn’t return an email or phone message Friday. PSAL girls basketball co-commissioner John LoSasso, who sources said wasn’t told of the new seeding until Thursday afternoon, also didn’t wish to comment.
Arnie Rosenbaum said that he, along with ADs and principals from the involved schools, received an e-mail from Douglas on Thursday night saying the seeding had been changed. Lewis principal Ali Shama met with Douglas this week, Rosenbaum said, and the director decided to form an independent committee.
The Lewis administration, Rosenbaum said, was looking for a firm explanation as to why its team was seeded fourth, and not second as expected. Instead, league officials kept just replying with the criteria used for seeding.
“If they would have said how that worked with us, it would have been fine,” Rosenbaum said. “If they can justify that and give us an explanation, we couldn’t argue with it.”
The decision to change a playoff seeding this late in the process – the playoffs start Monday – is a rare one and some league coaches don’t agree with the move. Most coaches have already started preparing for the teams they figured they would see in the playoff.
“I said all along that [Lewis was] deserving of the second seed,” Kennedy coach O’Neil Glenn said. “But I also believe that what’s done is done. I think they should have just let it be. They should have stuck to their guns.”
The common theme among coaches was that this could set off a chain reaction – if schools in any sport are unhappy with their seed, the PSAL has shown the capability of pulling off a switch.
“I just know what they did now sets a bad precedent,” said McKee/Staten Island Tech coach Peter LaMarca, whose team was seeded fifth. “I don’t know who complained or who got involved. Now you say, who’s really running the show? It’s sad.”
Rosenbaum actually agrees, in part.
“I can see it from their perspective,” he said. “Every single person that doesn’t like their seed is going to complain. But we thought we had a legitimate reason. And since they reversed it, I guess we did.”
Gladden’s team is most negatively affected by the change because it would have to meet Bergtraum before Madison Square Garden, which most teams want to avoid. The Nos. 2, 3, 6 and 7 seeds are the most attractive because they are in the opposite bracket of the dominant 11-time PSAL city champion. But the coach said the timing is what irked him the most.
“Today is Friday, two days before the playoffs,” Gladden said. “You can’t make a change like that at this point. If you make the change, make it Tuesday. … I’m happy Francis Lewis got the No. 2 seed, that’s what they deserved on Sunday. But the timing is bad.”