From Ernest Bowker.

The Mississippi High School Activities Association expanded the Class 5A baseball playoffs last year in an effort to make more people happy.

It turns out no one was happy with the new arrangement, though, so the organization has pulled the plug on the experiment.

The playoff format for Class 5A will revert to a 16-team, series-based bracket for the 2007 season. Last year, the MHSAA used a 24-team bracket with eight three-team regionals in the first round. Other classes, which have used the regional format for several years, will remain the same.

MHSAA executive director Ennis Proctor said the move back to the old format in Class 5A was a response to higher travel costs associated with the regional format.

&#8220Finances was the main reason. We have three divisions that have to send teams far away,” Proctor said. &#8220It just makes more sense to keep it closer to home if we can, especially with the way fuel costs are.”

Proctor added that there were no plans to reinstate the Class 5A regionals in the near future.

&#8220Not for a while. Not until things ease up a little bit,” he said.

While the expense of busing, feeding and housing teams for a weekend regional was a concern for athletic directors, the schedule drew the biggest complaints from coaches.

Rather than mixing and matching teams from three different divisions, the Class 5A regional included a division champion as host and two teams from a different division as the Nos. 2 and 3 seeds. The Nos. 2 and 3 teams played each other in the first game of the double-elimination regional, with the winner turning around and playing the host immediately afterward.

For Vicksburg and Warren Central, who played each other three times in the regional and three times during the regular season, it put them at a decided competitive disadvantage. After traveling 200 miles for a Friday afternoon game against each other, playing four games in three days was tough on everyone. A rainout also forced WC to play three games on the final day. The Vikings beat Southaven and then Vicksburg to reach the championship game, which was won by VHS.

Both Vicksburg High coach Jamie Creel and Warren Central’s Randy Broome, said they were in favor of the three-team format, but not in last year’s form.

&#8220I don’t think two teams from the same district should have gone to the same regional. It would have been simple to figure out a way to make teams from other districts play each other,” Broome said. &#8220I was a supporter and in favor of the three-team tournament, but some things needed to change.”

While nixing the first-round regional for Class 5A, the MHSAA also approved a division tournament for teams in that classification. Division 3-5A, which included Vicksburg, Warren Central, Madison Central and Greenville-Weston, will not have one, though. Instead, the division will continue to use a nine-game division schedule in which each team will face the others three times apiece.