ABCA announces minor changes for 2024 NCAA tournament
Last Thursday, the American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA) met to announce some new changes for the 2024 NCAA tournament.
One of the first announcements made was that players will be able to have their walk-up music during Regional and Super Regional play. That was a positive change as it allowed players to show a little more of their personality and helped them feel more comfortable as they stepped to the plate.
Another change that was implemented is that “Host teams in regionals and super regionals cannot use university housing for visiting teams, rather, they must be housed in hotels.”
This issue occurred at Kentucky last season when the Wildcats were hosting a Regional in Lexington but due to a music festival being in town, there were not enough hotel rooms for all of the visiting teams. That led to Kentucky having to house some of the players in campus dorms.
That is no longer allowed.
Another minor change that won’t affect the players but may play a factor in Regional seeding is that each game in each quadrant will now factor in the location of the game.
Here is the explanation.
Until now, game results were grouped strictly by RPI, with the quadrants as follows:
Moving forward, the quadrants will take into account results being at home, at a neutral site and on the road, as follows:
Note again that this does not signify any change in how the RPI is calculated. It simply changes the way the quadrant records appear on a team sheet in front of the selection committee.
As stated before, that does not affect the players much but it will be an interesting stat for the committee as they try to determine regional seeding.
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