There is no fool-proof way to vote for honors when it comes to athletes, but making people accountable for their ballots may help the process. That's been on my mind a lot recently after seeing the TSIAA all-conference and All-District 9-4A lists come out in the last two weeks.
I've been doing this for a long time, so I know some of the inner workings when it comes to making decisions on all-district teams. I can say this much - rarely are they aligned across the board. I've seen some that were purely based on coach voting, which was usually done after some lobbying for individual awards like MVP. There's others that have coaches vote only on players from other teams (in an effort to avoid the bias of picking their own players or having to decide between their own kids). And sometimes there's a set amount of players to be honored from each team based on their order of finish in the standings and their coach gets to bestow those honors.
How people vote can vary wildly too. Here's a couple local examples:
In the TSIAA South Division, there are seven teams and eight all-conference honors. The Boyd Lady Broncos won that division this year, going 12-0 (and winning nine of those games by 28 points or more -- sorry for bragging).
So when the all-conference awards were announced, you'd assume the undefeated champs would get the most, right? Nope. Boyd had one player recognized, the second-place team had three and the sixth-place team had two.
The best any of us looking on could tell was the conference coaches honored the top eight scorers in the league. That happens a lot in elementary ball too, so it can't be a big shock I suppose.
A couple miles down the road though, Warren County's Bri Taylor was putting up huge numbers for the Lady Pioneers, but her team wasn't winning. Warren County finished last in a six-team district and when all the awards were bestowed, Warren County was shut out.
For District 9-4A girls coaches, team success guided their voting process. Coffee County, the unbeaten champion, had four of the 10 players honored (including the MVP) and all those selected came from teams finishing in the top four.
I've always been a big fan of having some guidelines established to make things easier, including when I was a voting member for the local Hall of Fame. If you can tell people, "we take a certain number from the top-three teams," or "we weigh stats heavily in head-to-head matchups of players," then at least there's a clearer picture for those who want to debate.
From following this process for over a decade, I'm well aware somebody is always going to be upset, no matter where you cut off the voting. It can be five people, 10 or 20 being honored - there will always be one or two left out that felt they were worthy. Fixing that is impossible.
I'm not saying there's a perfect way, but I think we can all do better. At the very least, releasing ballots (or final results of voting) would make people more accountable during the process.
As for those who felt snubbed this year, all I can say is use it as fuel to come back next year and leave no doubt.
