McCallie 'Hopeful' NCAA Mock Selection Exercise Will Bolster Best Practices

Head coach Joanne P. McCallie, along with 16 other Division I women's basketball coaches, took a break from the grind of the recruiting trail last week, choosing to spend her July 16 and 17 in Indianapolis at an NCAA mock selection exercise. According to a press release, the coaches had "access to all the tools (game results, RPI calculations, etc.) that the actual committee follows when they put together the championship bracket... giving [them] a taste of the five-to-six days the real committee goes through on an annual basis."

In an interview with The Chronicle, the third-year coach commended the NCAA for the communicative and transparent aspects of the meeting, stressing the "unprecedented dialogue between coaches and the NCAA to talk about all the complications [in putting together the bracket]." She and her peers, she felt, saw the meeting as generally positive. She also made it clear, however, that the setting--a collection of road-weary coaches tired from non-stop recruiting--was conducive to compromise and non-accusation.

Talk eventually came up about the seeding situation of last season, when No. 1 Duke was forced to play a rowdy away game against No. 9 Michigan State, McCallie's former team. While McCallie made it clear that the committee steered away from particular cases, she did say that many in the room agreed that the Blue Devils' situation was not right, nor were the roads for many of the top seeds in last year's Tournament.

"We talked about how to make the best decisions for higher seeded teams," she said. "The way the Tournament was structured last year, you had 8's and 9's hosting, and certainly everyone was uncomfortable with a higher seed going to play at a lower seed's court."

Well, is it going to happen again next year?

"There are ways to make sure it won't happen again.... We all came away from [the committee] hopeful that next year's bracket will have less [of these] concerns," she added. "Next year you can look at the bracket and say, 'Oh, that makes sense.' We're going to use this as a springboard for next year."