As I was enjoying Southern hospitality and being a patron at that little course in Georgia, you know what message was sent to me via text, email and direct message the most?
What happened to the win-loss standings on the Rhode Island Interscholastic League’s website?
Listen, the only way the RIIL’s website would win a beauty contest would be in a game of Monopoly. But what it lacked in aesthetics, it made up for in functionality. Everything was a click away and wasn’t difficult to find.
The RPI changed that.
With the RIIL using RPI instead of wins and losses to determine playoff seeding – a decision that remains No. 1 on the most overthought and unnecessary things in the history of RI high school sports, as seen by this little lawsuit – it made the tradition win-loss standings page completely irrelevant.
The RIIL did everyone a favor in the fall and kept the page active on its website. While there was an RPI tab, the large majority of people used traditional standings to figure out how things worked. It was the same story in the winter season.
Things have since changed. The RIIL’s traditional win-loss standings are no longer being updated by their website provider, which has caused panic by those looking to find out how teams are doing – present company included.
If you are one of the panicked, I have a solution.
My dumb brain remembered I was using the RPI Standings at the end of basketball season. While it might seem scary and confusion, trust me – it’s not.
So how do you navigate the RIIL’s standing pages now?
Go to the website. Pick you sport, then click the giant blue “standings” button or the RPI Standings in the left tab. That’s the easy part.
When you see the standings, it provides information that’s unnecessary. There’s no explanation for what any of the letters or numbers mean, so here’s my advice – don’t worry about it.
The columns on the right tell you who teams have won and lost against and what teams are coming up on the schedule, but it’s presented in a way that makes me want to throw my laptop across a room. Ignore this stuff too.
There is a simple solution to all of this. When you’re on the RPI Standings page, just click the name of the team whose information you’re after. Once you do, it brings up everything you need to know – when and where it was played, what the score was, and whether or not it’s considered a league game or non-league, plus the future schedule.
Not every game is updated, but that’s on coaches not doing their jobs in a timely fashion. You can cross reference missing games on MaxPreps, provided you love pop-up ads and videos that play at an absurd volume.
Do I like this change? I’m a Rhode Islander, so of course not. Is this change good? No, but only because RPI is inherently stupid and unnecessary for a state this small.
Is the website functional and the information easy to find? Yes.
And that’s what matters, at least for this column.
Now let’s get on to the rankings.
