November 6, 2020
Each year, Rugby Ohio has changed their competition format to drive competitive balance. To simplify, streamline and bring consistency to this effort, we’ve established regional conferences for all high school teams for regular season play.
This new conference structure makes regular season play more objective – and keeps unnecessary travel to a minimum. The conference structure is also modeled somewhat after the OHSAA football model, so it’ll look familiar to new families and school athletic directors.
Here’s a breakdown of the conference organization. Note that each conference has both boys and girls teams:
As a part of this effort, we’ve also created logos for each of the five regional conferences, along with their own brand colors. Coaches may download the logo artwork for flyers and other marketing materials. We ask that these logos not be altered or modified – Rugby Ohio owns the rights to each regional logo.
Divisional Playoffs Structure
Much like OHSAA’s 2020 football playoff, every team will make the post season.
How will seeding work? We have developed a computer model similar to that used by OHSAA for their football seeding. Learn more about the playoff seedings here.
While this system is foreign to the rugby landscape, the players and their parents will understand this model as it has been used in high school sports in Ohio for decades. It will also be ‘speaking the same language’ as high school athletic directors and administration.
Since everyone is making the playoffs, the model isn’t eliminating anyone from the post season like high school athletes are accustomed to in OHSAA competitions.
This will result in either a 2 or 3 week playoff for all boys and girls division. The first week of the playoffs may require teams to travel. Playoffs will be located in Columbus to make travel as convenient as possible for all teams.
