All games for District 52 11-year-old tournament pushed back one day in impromptu scheduling change

None of the other four District 52 tournaments — 10s, 12s, 14s and 16s — will be affected by the scheduling change.

The change was necessary due to a scheduling error prompted by the unique number of teams in the tourney. There are only 10 teams in the 11s tournament. Ordinarily there are 11 or 12 teams in a bracket, but two cities’ Little League organizations, Half Moon Bay and Foster City, did not field an 11s team this season.

Because of the 10-team format — the first time in Gibbs’ tenure as district administrator a tournament has fielded that number of teams — only six teams fall to the elimination bracket following the primary round of play.

“In the 11’s tournament, because it’s a little smaller ... we had a 10-team tournament,” Gibbs said, “and in that case, you have six teams drop to the [elimination] bracket; and in that case you have two teams that get essentially [an elimination] bracket bye.”

The previous schedule would have caused a team like Belmont-Redwood Shores — that won its Saturday opener and lost its second-round game Sunday — to potentially play eight straight calendar days. Pushing back the tournament a day now remedies that situation.

“We figured the thing that would be most fair to do would be to align the bracket the way it’s supposed to, but to postpone it one day,” Gibbs said.

The first round of elimination-bracket play will now be played Tuesday. The second round of elimination play is Wednesday. The third round of winners’-bracket play is Thursday. The third round of elimination play is Friday. The winners’ semifinals and the elimination quarterfinals are Saturday. The elimination semifinals are Sunday. The championship round will now be played Monday, with the if-necessary game scheduled for Tuesday.

“We’re treating it like it’s a rainout,” Gibbs said.

District 52 had initially scheduled the championship rounds of the 10s, 11s and 12s tournaments to start on different days. The championship rounds of the 10s and 11s tournaments will now start on the same day, Monday, June 30.

“We like to have them on different days because it gives people a chance to go to all of them ... so it’s nice to not have them (on the same day),” Gibbs said. “But it’s a double-elimination tournament, so the if-needed games usually spoil our plans anyway. ... We try to lay these out to land right, and then the tournaments kind of have a mind of their own, and we kind of require the extra game anyway.”