(7-15-26) In a recent South Bend Tribune article about seeding the Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) boys and girls basketball tournaments.

IHSAA commissioner Paul Neidig in an interview for the Tribune story said-

“That’s not the case in all of the other states. Everybody participates here, and that puts us in a different standard. We need to be realistic about the differences in schools as far as different locations and the different resources they have.”

What!!!! Ping-pong balls in a blind draw doesn’t solve anything that he mentioned above.

What Neidig does suggest is what the single-class system use to give the IHSAA.

Next door neighbor Ohio has seven classes in boys and girls basketball and every school is seeded and plays in both tournaments.

How many other states use ping-pong balls to seed any of their tournaments.

This should not be just one man deciding this process…let the membership vote on it.

This is why it might be time to find some new leadership for the future….Neidig has served as the IHSAA Commissioner since 2020. He served as an assistant commissioner prior to that from 2017 to 2020 and oversaw boys basketball. Prior to coming to the IHSAA, Neidig had a 31-year career in education for the Evansville School Corporation.

Related: Time To Retire The Ping-Pong Balls

ChatGPT

Among U.S. state high school athletic associations, only one is known to use ping-pong balls as the primary method of determining tournament brackets:

  1. Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA)
    • Indiana conducts a blind draw using ping-pong balls in a lottery-style machine to place teams into tournament brackets for many sports, including football, basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, soccer, tennis, and others. Teams are not seeded based on records in these tournaments; instead, the draw determines bracket placement.  

Several other state associations use random draws, but not ping-pong balls. For example:

  • Illinois High School Association uses its long-standing “Rolling of the Peas” tradition to determine certain state finals pairings after teams have qualified. Despite the name, this is a separate random-draw method and is not used to seed teams.  
  • Most other state associations now use objective seeding systems based on rankings, RPI, power ratings, coaches’ votes, or other criteria. For example, Iowa seeds postseason brackets based on rankings and established procedures rather than random draws.  

So, if your question is specifically about ping-pong balls being used to determine tournament brackets or seed placement, the answer is:

One state athletic association: Indiana (IHSAA). 

About the Draw
To conduct the random drawing for the state tournaments, the IHSAA places ping-pong balls representing each school in each sectional into a lottery-style air mix machine. A motorized fan in the bottom of the machine blows the balls around the inside of the transparent container and air then forces each ball up through a tube in random order.

For example, the first ball retrieved from the machine will be the visiting team in game one with the second ball representing the home team in game one. The third ball to come out is the visitor in game two and the fourth ball the home team in game two. That same method is followed through all 64 sectionals and 16 regionals.