When Westfield met Landstown for the VHSL Class 6 state championship Thursday afternoon at VCU, something strange happened.
Two of the best high school teams in Virginia were playing for a state title — and the building was mostly empty.
Both schools are more than two hours away. A mid-afternoon weekday tipoff makes travel difficult for parents, students, and alumni. Traffic delayed the Westfield pep buses so badly that when they finally arrived, the building suddenly came alive. For a moment, the game felt like what a state championship should feel like.
But the emptiness raised a fair question.
Why schedule a state championship game at a time when the people who care most about it can’t attend?
The answer is structural.
Virginia now crowns twelve basketball champions — six boys and six girls. To fit them all into one venue, the VHSL spreads the games across three days at four games per day. Logistically it works.
Emotionally, it doesn’t.
Forty years ago the state tournament followed a structure that made far more sense. In the mid-1980s, when I was in high school, the boys championships were played at University Hall on the campus of the University of Virginia — the legendary “Ralph House.”
The format was simple:
Single-A semifinals Thursday night
AA semifinals Friday afternoon
AAA semifinals Friday night — the main event
Final Four sessions created energy because the games were connected. You watched two semifinals knowing the winners would meet for the championship. Fans stayed because the outcome of one game directly shaped the next.
Tournament basketball thrives on that connection.
(At the time, girls basketball had only recently begun its state tournament structure. The AAA girls semifinals were played during the same championship weekend — one year the semis were held at Albemarle High School while the boys played at University Hall — while the A and AA girls classifications still played their seasons in the fall.)
And the championship day itself followed the same logic. Saturday afternoon featured the A and AA boys finals, while Saturday night built to the biggest stage — the AAA girls final followed by the AAA boys championship.
The entire weekend built toward a crescendo.
At some point the VHSL moved away from that structure. Doubleheaders were split. Boys and girls semifinal sessions were separated. Eventually the semifinals disappeared from the championship weekend entirely.
What replaced it is efficient but far less compelling.
On Thursday at VCU, once the Class 6 session ended, most fans left. The evening session featured excellent teams — Norview, Green Run, Princess Anne, and Menchville — but nearly everyone departed because those schools had no connection to the games they had just watched. You can watch great basketball between random teams on television.
When tournament games lose their narrative connection, neutral fans drift away.
The older structure understood something simple about sports — and about events generally.
The main event comes last.
In the old format, the largest classification — AAA — played Friday night. The schedule built anticipation from the smallest schools to the largest, from early rounds to the biggest stage. It felt like a crescendo.
Today the largest schools might play first, on a Thursday afternoon.
That isn’t fairness. It’s confusion.
There is a better solution.
Reduce the number of classifications. Restore Final Four sessions. Keep boys semifinal sessions together and girls semifinal sessions together so each tournament builds its own momentum. Then, when the championships are played, keep the girls and boys finals for the same classification paired together — allowing communities to support both teams when a school reaches the stage in both sports.
Most importantly, keep the structure consistent from year to year so fans across Virginia know when and where to come.
Tournament basketball is one of the most exciting forms of sport ever invented. The drama is built into the format.
But formats only work when the structure supports the drama.
If the VHSL wants fuller arenas and better atmospheres, it doesn’t need a marketing plan.
It just needs to open the program from 1984.