Two months ago, the question was whether the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association would move its state basketball tournaments to Green Bay, or keep them in Madison.

The answer, which arrived Tuesday, is … both. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel puts it:

 The WIAA Board of Control approved an executive recommendation Tuesday to move its girls basketball state tournament to the Resch Center in Ashwaubenon for the next two seasons while keeping its boys state basketball tournament at the Kohl Center in Madison through 2020.

The decision comes a little more than two months after the WIAA Board supported an executive staff recommendation to enter into a five-year deal to play the tournaments at the Resch Center.

The WIAA, however, left the door open to continuing to host its state boys and girls basketball tournaments on the University of Wisconsin campus, an opportunity UW took advantage of by guaranteeing the dates the WIAA was looking for.

That is an unusual decision, to say the least. The WIAA girls and boys volleyball tournaments are in separate locations, but boys volleyball was a non-WIAA sport for several years. It’s almost as if girls basketball returned to the old six-on-six days (for those unfamiliar, three players on each half of the court, last seen in Oklahoma and Iowa), or, like Michigan, decided to play in the fall instead of the winter.

The plus for the girls tournament’s moving to Green Bay is that the smaller Resch Center might provide a better atmosphere for state games than the cavernous Kohl Center. (Another high school basketball fan in the household begs to differ with that assertion.) The minuses remain the fact that Green Bay is farther from the state’s population and geographic centers than Madison, and the difference in atmosphere between the Lambeau Field neighborhood, which is on the opposite side of Green Bay from UW–Green Bay, and the UW–Madison campus. And there remains the question of whether the TV stations that cover the state boys tournament will cover the state girls tournament in the same way when the two states will require complete set-up and tear-down of equipment one week apart.

The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison described the decision as “Solomonic.” (Which seems to be a word similar to “impactful” or “proactive,” which is to say it’s not really a word. But whatever.) It’s obvious, though, that Green Bay got something less than half a loaf — two years of the lesser of the two basketball tournaments in terms of media attention, attendance and business impact, as in $3 million for the girls tournament and $6 million for the boys tournament.

The Green Bay Press–Gazette reports:

Moving the boys tournament to the Resch Center was not a desirable option for the WIAA.

Associate director Deb Hauser was worried the facility would not be able to accommodate the amount of fans that the Kohl Center can, and in turn would have to turn them away.

The boys tournament last month attracted anywhere from 12,000 to 13,000 fans for certain sessions, and Hauser said the Resch Center likely could only accommodate approximately 9,300 fans per session.

The girls tournament does not attract as many people, which should ease any of those attendance concerns.

“It would be a challenge for us to fit our boys tournament into the Resch Center,” Hauser said. “This year our tournament grew, and that’s significant. When you begin to turn people away, that becomes difficult. Really, the capacity is a key part of this.”

It wasn’t the only key.

“We would have had to modify our TV schedule had we chosen to move the boys, because we would have needed to move people in different ways to accommodate the fans,” Hauser said. “We use the end zone areas for our student sections. There wasn’t enough seats at the Resch to put two schools side-by-side. We would have had to have additional time to clear and do single sessions and modify our schedules.

“Just a lot of logistic tournament issues that were of pretty serious concern.”

That is a strange issue to suddenly come up now. The Kohl Center has never been filled since state moved there, while some tournament sessions at the UW Fieldhouse (generally involving Madison-area teams) were sold out. So why consider moving the tournament at all if you’re concerned about not being able to sell all the tickets you’re capable of selling? Using Hauser’s logic, the Packers should expand Lambeau Field by the size of their season-ticket waiting list.

The other bit of WIAA news Tuesday was the move of the state summer baseball tournament from Bukolt Park in Stevens Point to the new stadium at Concordia University in Mequon.

I haven’t been to Bukolt Park (which, for those who have never been there, is on the Wisconsin River) since the 1989 summer tournament, one of my favorite sports stories. (Imagine a team that finished 9–11, with its pitching rotation screwed up because of fickle summer weather, nonetheless not only getting to state, with a freshman pitching his first varsity game in the sectional final, but getting to the state title game.) I suspect Bukolt Park is nowhere near as nice as Fox Cities Stadium, the site of the spring baseball tournament, or even most college ballparks. And with most of the summer baseball teams now in the Milwaukee area, moving makes sense.

The unfortunate part is that summer state is being significantly scaled back, from eight teams to four, and from seven games over two days to three games on one day. Summer baseball swelled briefly after the WIAA’s merger with the late Wisconsin Independent Schools Athletic Association, but despite, I believe, having a similar number of teams as with the aforementioned ’89 team (which needed three teams to get to state), the WIAA decided to chop summer state in half.

I’ve had the argument with high school coaches for years over whether baseball should be a spring or summer sport. I understand the importance of American Legion teams where they exist. (Have I mentioned yet that Ripon won both the WIAA Division 2 and American Legion Class A state titles last year?) That contrasts with the reality of the Wisconsin spring, where during usual springs few days are suitable for baseball, including the days on which baseball is played, despite the fact that the season runs later than it originally did. Last spring sucked weather-wise until the postseason began. Ripon’s two sectional games were played in, of course, 90-degree weather.

Baseball should be played in weather that makes you more concerned about heat exhaustion than frostbite.