The prospect of a regional format for the state softball tournament will have to wait at least another year after the HHSAA executive board's decision to amend the HIADA recommendation Thursday morning. Greg Yamamoto | SL

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The prospect of a regional format for the state softball tournament will have to wait at least another year.

The Hawaii High School Athletic Association executive board met Thursday morning at the Hilton Waikoloa Village on the Big Island, one day after the conclusion of the 55th annual Hawaii Interscholastic Athletic Directors Association Conference.

The executive board, which is made up of the presidents from the five statewide leagues, voted to accept 17 of the 19 HIADA recommendations as presented, which will go into effect for the 2015-16 school year. However, it amended a recommendation to implement a regional for softball to take effect instead take effect in the spring of 2017.

"They voted to amend that to reform the regional committee to explore the possibility of softball for not this year, but for the following school year," HHSAA executive director Chris Chun said when reached by phone Wednesday afternoon.

Chun is not a voting member of the executive board, so he could not speak to its reasoning behind the amendment, but gave his take on the prospective schedule change.

"I don't know why they did it, but personally I thought softball would have been hard to implement a regional format, just because there would be no real place to go and with (the University of Hawaii's) softball schedule we're lucky to have Rainbow Wahine Softball Stadium for one weekend," Chun said. "So to have back-to-back weekends there would be almost impossible and then we'd be looking into finding other venues that are not suitable for state-tournament play for the first weekend and we'd jeopardize not having the championship at Rainbow Wahine Softball Stadium. I'm not sure that logistically softball would work for a regional format."

A committee was formed more than two years ago to help implement regionals for several other tournaments and in that span the HHSAA has experimented with two-week formats in the boys' and girls' soccer, girls' basketball and boys' volleyball state tournaments.

By essentially tabling the proposed softball regional for a year, the committee will have more time to hammer out the logistics. However, Chun cautioned that nothing is set in stone just yet.

"It's a possibility that this could change again next year because it never technically got voted to approved to move softball to a regional format," Chun said. "Again, all that got approved was the vote to bring back the committee to explore the possibility of softball for the following school year."

Chun also noted that the committee has the power to explore regional options for other sports as well.

"They didn't really say 'another sport,' but I know it will be discussed," Chun said.

Also on Thursday, the executive board voted to deny the HIADA recommendation that sought to reduce the number of weight classes for boys' and girls' wrestling from 14 to 12.

"It was just a concern as to why we'd go down to twelve, because essentially all of our state brackets are full. It's just hard to fill out on the league level," Chun said. "In the past they had voted to change the weights, but did it with the knowledge of what weights we'd replace them with. This one was vague. The committee could have said, ‘Get rid of this one,' but we could be taking the chance of getting rid of a popular weight class."

The current weight classes used by the HHSAA does not fall in line with that of the National Federation of High Schools.

"We have fourteen different weight classes, but the same number of weight classes as the National Federation," Chun said.