The state softball tournament continued to re-invent itself with Wednesday’s announcement that the University of Kentucky will host the event in 2019 and 2020.

The move ends an 11-year run at Owensboro’s Jack C. Fisher Park and ushers in a new era that will see some changes in the state tournament format.

The KHSAA announced last year that the tournament will go from being double-elimination to single-elimination and last September voted to reduce the number of state participants to eight by adding a sub-sectional round similar to what is already being used for soccer.

While coaches are excited about the move to a college venue, which will be able to accommodate more than 2,000 fans, and the move to single elimination, there was a little trepidation about the addition of a sub-sectional round.

“I think everybody for the most part is excited about it being moved to a college field,” Warren East coach Philip McKinney said. “I know I have read some stuff on Twitter last night and today that some people don’t like it being moved to Lexington, but I don’t see how you can be upset about where it is at. That’s an SEC field. That’s the University of Kentucky. It would be like that if it had been at UofL, a really nice Division I field. I think the girls, the coaches, the parents and the fans are going to enjoy going to these nice universities.”

South Warren coach Kelly Johnson Reynolds is also excited about the move to Lexington, adding that teams in Region 4 have already had the chance to experience the college environment with the region tournament being held at Western Kentucky University.

“One of the nice things about the region tournament here is we get to play at Western,” Reynolds said. “I think it’s nice where we have the region at Western and then you transition into a state tournament at a college field at UK. I think it is a good environment – it’s more big time, under the big lights. I think it’s great.”

The single-elimination format will also allow each game to have its own time slot, as opposed to the long-used double-elimination format where up to four games were played at one time. Each team would play one game a day in single elimination. Last year in the double-elimination format, Warren East played three games on the final day, one that went 13 innings, and barely had time to rest.

“You really don’t get to take it all in,” McKinney said. “There is no way you can go from field to field and actually watch each game. You are just watching a couple of batters here and a couple of batters there, unless it is your team that is playing. Being one game at a time, you can really lock in and the focus is on that game. When we played East Carter, from what I heard, the whole park was over there watching us play East Carter and there were three other games going on.”

One change McKinney is not as excited about is the addition of a sub-sectional round. The format in soccer sees a rotation between four regions – Regions 1, 2, 3 and 4 in this pod – where Region 4 would play against one of the other regions for the chance to advance to Lexington.

“To me, you win region, you should go to state,” McKinney said. “I don’t care what sport it is. You get out of your region, you should go to state. I know you can’t just draw out of a hat and put four teams together in a quad, because you could have somebody around Paducah and somebody around Richmond. I’m not a big fan of the same four regions playing year in and year out. I think that takes away a little bit from getting out of your region.”

McKinney added there is a familiarity factor that will be added with the sub-sectional that wasn’t there when the state tournament took all 16 teams.

“In the fourth region we play teams from the third and the second, even the first, in the regular season,” McKinney said. “They come to our tournaments and we go to their tournaments. The two years we have been to state it is nice playing someone from the 14th or the 15th, somebody that you don’t know them and they don’t know you. That is one of the excitements about going to state. Not that the excitement won’t still be there, but it will be a little different.”

The KHSAA will finalize the sub-sectional plans and rotations next month. Reynolds said she is anxious to see how it plays out.

“There has been very little talk about how that is going to work,” Reynolds said. “Now that the (state) site has been named, I hope that they touch more on how the sub-sectional is going to work.”{&end}