As I've written previously, the format for picking a team state champion is flawed in several ways ... the IHSA does not do enough to ensure the best teams advance, a problem that could be fixed by changing two things: seeding teams in sectional complex format a la basketball or baseball, and holding dual-team regionals instead of picking team sectional qualifiers via an individual tournament ...

The state's best teams are clustered in a few geographic areas, which resulted in some seriously unbalanced regional assignments ... three regionals featured two teams ranked in the top 10 in Class AA by the Illinois Best Weekly ... that trio included Lincoln-Way Central, where the host Knights outpointed three-time defending state champ Sandburg in an epic battle ...

At least there was enough separation between LW Central and Sandburg (10.5 points) that there wasn't any doubt over which team should advance ...

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case at Alton, where it was originally reported that Edwardsville had edged Granite City 218-217.5 for the regional title ... it was subsequently discovered that, in fact, Granite City had won 217.5-217 ...

But even though both schools accepted the corrected result, the IHSA initially did not ... citing a National Federation rule that scoring mistakes must be corrected within 30 minutes after the end of a tournament, the IHSA at first insisted that Edwardsville would advance to the team sectional ...

Adherence to the rules is fine -- except when it makes a mockery of the principle of fair play ... it's a pretty bitter pill for kids to swallow that they work for months to get a chance to compete in a sectional -- and then have that chance taken away because of a scoring error ...

As Illinois Best Weekly's Rob Sherrill pointed out, the advent of computerized scoring has created an impression that mistakes are no longer made ... which clearly isn't the case ...

This whole mess could have been avoided if the team tournament actually was a team tournament from start to finish ... scoring tournaments is much more complex than duals, as anyone who's done it knows ... keeping track of byes, forfeits, defaults, bonus points and the random deduction for unsportsmanlike conduct is a huge task and not for the inexperienced nor the non-detail-oriented ...

As it turns out, this story has a happy ending for Granite City and those who value the integrity of high school sports ... the IHSA reversed itself and allowed the correct score to stand, advancing the Warriors to their own team sectional ...

We can only hope this is the beginning of a new era of sanity, in which common sense and reality are taken into account in tweaking the state series to make it as fair as possible for as many athletes as possible ...