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 four tournaments that begin with the out-bracket round on Monday, May 20th.

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 since 2007, the seeding predicted three of the top four finishers 92 percent of the time. Twenty-six times the top two seeded teams finished in the top two.

So, why play the tournament one might ask? Paul Wilson, one of the people responsible for the seeding, responds," Irondequoit serves as a good example. In 2010 the Eagles, with a very good team, struggled in the early season and was seeded fifth in the Class B tournament after sorting out their issues. They 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 in the Seed Procedures document 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. Paul Wilson says,

"There is no doubt that teams that play good and 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 Boys Lacrosse Coordinator, Mike Simon. "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 Saturday.