D1 Boys POY

Some good questions, and there is always a hypothetical situation to prove a point. I'd much rather hear about a situation where this type of "award" system is in place already, meaning - they have one overall award that includes regular season and playoffs. Off the top of my head a can't think of one.

So don't just look at the NHIAA for a solution, what they have in place is a Sports-wide acceptable way of doing this. There's a reason for that.

Now on one of the other points you raised - it's not always about a coach "seeing" a player. The Coaches around NH are a network. They talk to each other - a lot. Ask Dave Haley how much the Somersworth coach knows about Conant, Gilford or some other DIII school. The coaches around the State have the best pulse on the league, they know if a kid was the catalyst to win a game (even if he only scored 6 points but held an opponent in check). They know about the game changing plays that didn't get mentioned in the 500 word write up in the Telegraph. There is nobody else in the State (except maybe Haley/Leveille) that have their pulse on the state of the league, the players, the games etc more so than the Coaches. Now that's not every Coach obviously, but the majority of them take this seriously and know every team, and every starter on that team and their strengths/weaknesses. They are a fair voting body.

I certainly would be skeptical about a vote coming from the general print media (Haley/Leveille/Tarrier and a very small handful of others would be a fair representation). Most of the print guys are localized and probably have seen less of some of these teams than the Coaches have. Which is why they select their "all-state" teams based on their readership radius.

So who else is there?

I think this is a great topic to discuss, and points can obviously be made either way. Jeremy L has eloquently argued for a "season long" POY for some time and his argument is certainly palpable. Do I think the NHIAA will ever go to this type of scenerio? No chance.

I would be interested to learn of a league where this type of award-system is currently in place. It would make the argument a heck of a lot stronger.

I think coaches may not get to the games - but via scouting reports and game tapes they probably have more to go on than often thought.

I like the regular season POY system and having Tourney MVP personally.

Keep the regular season and the playoffs separate. POY for the the regular season.

As many of you know, when I was at WGAM we used to do our own Mr. Football and Mr. Basketball awards which is different than POY, the Gatorade POY and whoever does the official "Mr Basketball" award. Here's how we came up with the eventual winner...We took both the regular season and the tournament into consideration to come up with a list of 15 "candidates" across all divisions. Once we had our Top 15 we sent that list out to various local media people who cover the teams and had them vote for their top 5(or 6...I can't quite remember)from the list. Our WGAM "Friday Night Lights" staff(me, Mike Mutnansky, Rory Duyon, Chris Shuker, Sean Sendall and others all had votes). The media people who we asked to vote were guys like Gary Fitz and Tom King from the Telegraph, Kevin Gray and Eric Emmeriling(hoops) and KG/Marc Thaler(for football) from the UL, Jamie Staton and Jason King from WMUR, Dave Haley and Jeremy, John Doyle from Fosters, Hector Luongo(Eagle Tribune) and Roger Brown(for football). I could be forgetting someone, if so I'm sorry. Bottom line, we had a pretty knowledgeable group of people giving their opinions on the matter. Once everybody returned their "ballots" with their top 5(or 6...sorry it was a couple years ago so my memory is foggy) we tallied up all the votes which gave us our 5(or 6)Mr. Football/Basketball "finalists" who were invited to an awards banquet/LIVE broadcast where the eventual winner was announced. Before the banquet, we sent the "finalists" names back out to our voters who then had to rank them 1 thru 5(or 6). Once we got the 2nd ballot back we tallied up the votes and had our Mr. Basketball/Football winner.

Because players from any division were eligible we made sure to look deep and not just consider D1(or Class L players) as "worthy" candidates. We usually ended up with 2 or 3 kids from D1 and 1 or 2 from D2...with an occasional D3 player. In football we even had a couple D4 and D5 kids make it as finalists...and I know we had a couple D3 kids from Souhegan win Mr. Football(both Jellison brothers if I remember correctly).

I know WGAM didn't do their Mr. Football award this past fall...and I'm not sure what their plans are for hoops...if any. Back when I was there we used to cover ALOT more games and teams each week, but that was during the high times of the station(before 98.5 and WEEI lit up the FM dial with static-free sports talk you could hear in southern NH)...unfortunately, with station budget cuts and downsizing, coupled with sagging sponsorships for the high school show they are down to only doing 2 games a week.