Jenks has balancing act with NBC schedule

Organizing a bracket of only 16 teams shouldn’t be that difficult. At least that’s what most people would think.

It's different to National Baseball Congress World Series general manager Kevin Jenks. The making of the 16-team championship round bracket is a behemoth of a task for Jenks. In his second year as general manager, Jenks spent hours and hours working on the bracket, coming back to work on the intricacies of it plenty of times.

Every nook and cranny — all 25 games and scheduled gametimes — have to be perfect. Or close to it at least.

“There’s just a whole lot of elements that you have to consider when you’re sitting down and looking at it,” Jenks said. “It’s a challenge, and you have to give yourself a situation where it’s all you focus on for a couple of hours at a time, so it’s done in the wee hours of the morning when there aren’t phone calls, or people coming into the office, or games being played.”

The first of those elements is dealing with the Kansas teams, and making sure they don’t run into each other early. Teams don’t want to work all summer just to match up with a team they just played last month. .

Jenks made sure that wouldn’t happen. With six Kansas teams in the tournament, there’s no Kansas-on-Kansas matchups in the first round, and only one potential matchup between two Jayhawk League teams in the second round, and that’s only because Liberal made it through the first week of the tournament.

“The thing about the World Series is you want to play someone you haven’t played before,” Jenks said.

Then there’s seeding. Last year’s champion, Santa Barbara, is the top seed. Last year’s runner-up, the Seattle Studs, are the No. 2 seed. Those are givens. But the rest of the seeds are tentatively decided by last year’s finishes.

“Since the Hays Larks finished in third place in the 2014 World Series, a Jayhawk League team is going to be either a three or a four seed,” Jenks explained. “But just because someone goes 0-2 doesn’t mean that league is going to be a 16 seed returning. They may go between 13 and 16.”

And there’s more, too. There’s teams coming from the Pacific time zone who can’t play at certain times. The two teams who advanced from the first week need a break after playing four or more games. Sometimes local teams have requests, or needs. And all of this baseball is squeezed into a single week.

But there’s a reason for all of it, even if it makes a manager, players, or fans upset.

“I know there are people out there, and they go, ‘Why didn’t they do this? Why didn’t they do that?’ There’s a reason for it,’” Jenks said. “The managers will say something to you, or make a suggestion, and you’ll tell them why you did that … you don’t make everyone happy.”

This story was originally published August 1, 2015 at 8:32 AM with the headline "Jenks has balancing act with NBC schedule."