(1-26-25) In this world of technology and formulas to determine seedings for high school athletic tournaments…two state associations go with an old-fashion system.

Indiana has ping-pong balls and Illinois has peas to determine tournament brackets in some form.

The Rolling of the Peas is a tri-annual (fall, winter, spring) blind drawing that determines the state final pairings in IHSA bracketed team sports.

The 2024-25 winter drawing was held at the IHSA Office on January 13. This drawing covered the winter sports of girls basketball, boys basketball, and dual team wrestling, as well as Scholastic Bowl. The IHSA staff members made the drawings.

Traditionally, the pairings are made by ordering the sites that feed into the state finals in alphabetical order and numbering them. Then numbered peas are drawn from a bottle. The number on the first pea drawn represents the site whose winner will occupy the first position on the bracket, and so on. “The rolling of the peas” dates back to at least 1940.

(From May, 2014) The Rolling of the Peas is an IHSA tradition that dates back to the 1940’s and potentially earlier.

The Chicago Daily News story below from 1947 was the earliest reference to the Rolling of the Peas until 2015, when the IHSA discovered a reference to it in a 1940 publication, also pictured below.

Postseason assignments in IHSA team sports are based upon geography at the Regional, Sectional and Super-Sectional rounds. For the state finals, the peas provide a random, unbiased process to determine who will play who in the first round. The process itself is very easy. Each site is assigned a pea number and each pea contains a corresponding number on it. Peas are then drawn to determine which site winners will meet at the state finals.

By 1975 the IHSA was regularly bringing in neutral parties (usually media members) to roll the peas, thus ensuring a witness to the sometimes controversial process of pairing the teams. Occasionally special guests have shown up to roll the peas, like the members of the Fenwick High School Water Polo team, who stopped in Bloomington to roll the peas en route to a tournament in St. Louis in 2012.

The original peas and leather bottle are now on display at the IHSA Peak Performance Center at the Peoria Riverfront Museum. A modern, plastic bottle (above)rolls the official peas these days.

Thanks to the IHSA ….