As the regular season winds down this last week, prognosticators and amateur math wizards are working hard to figure out who will take the top seeds in each of the three tournaments that begin with the out bracket round on Monday, May 23rd.

The seeding procedures for Section Five Lacrosse have been successful for more than twenty years, with only a few modifications over the years. In Class A, for example, in a study of the results from the last ten years, the seeding predicted three of the top four finishers 100 percent of the time. Fifty percent of the time the team seeded first finished as champion.

So, why play the tournament one might ask? Paul Wilson, responsible for the seeding, responds," Irondequoit is one reason. Last year the Eagles, with a very good team, was seeded fifth in the Class B tournament and won the championship. You never know, but the seeding does seem to create the best games," he says.

The procedure is well documented in the SportsFive Knowledge base and in the example documents, but in its simplest form, each team receives points for each of the games they play. The number of points is based on the final winning percentage for each opponent. When the points are added together and divided by the number of games played, each team ended up with an average seeding number which is used to rank order each team in each class.

"There is no doubt that teams that play good, hard competition can do well in the seeding," says Wilson. If you play a top team and lose, you get the same number of points as if you beat a very weak team."

Because the numbers are based on the final record of opponents, in some cases, key "thresholds" may be changed at the last minute. For example, a team playing sixteen games can lose four games and still be a "75% team", giving opponents ten points for a win and four points for a loss. If they drop one more and loose five games, the give 8 points for a win and 3 points for a loss. In some cases teams will "be on the bubble" right down to their last game of the season.

"We will be looking at out of section teams as well as our own Section Five teams when loading the data on Saturday," says Wilson. "Any team that is played by a Section Five team must be tracked. It can be very detailed work, but the results are worth it."

So it looks like it will be fun to guess this week who will take the top spots and who will play in the early rounds, but look for the official seedings here on Sunday night.