Unnecessarily complicated.

That should be the motto for District 7 and 10 — and, well, pretty much every sports district and entity in the entire state.

Running a large athletic organization is difficult. I know that. We all know that. A district as large as the WPIAL has a lot of moving parts. There are 132 member schools playing 17 sports from football to basketball to gymnastics to field hockey. Member school also play sports that aren't officially recognized by the body.

That's a lot of schools and a lot of sports to keep track of.

But sometimes an organization as large as the WPIAL gets bogged down by its own weight and self-importance.

Take the curious case of Waynesburg hurdler Daniel Layton.

Layton entered the WPIAL Track and Field Championships intent on defending his district title in the 110-meter hurdles. Only problem was Layton's father, Rick, who is also the boys track and field coach at the school, inadvertently scratched his son from that event instead of the 300-meter hurdles as intended.

It should have been an easy fix. It was clearly an error — no way was the young Layton going to skip an event he won the gold medal in the year before.

But, you guessed it. The WPIAL made it ...

Unnecessarily complicated.

The WPIAL voted to deny the Laytons request to fix the error. The vote was 12-3. Yes, 12 adults voted to punish a kid for a clerical error that had an easy remedy.

The Laytons appealed to the PIAA, which fortunately voted unanimously to allow Daniel Layton to run.

Kudos to the PIAA.

Layton then went out and not only won the WPIAL title in the 110 hurdles, but the state title as well.

If the WPIAL had its way, it would have denied Layton that triumphant memory.

Shame.

District 10, though, has the WPIAL trumped when it comes to head-scratching procedures.

District 10 to the WPIAL: “Here. Hold my bracket.”

In most sports, the District 10 tournament is an open one. Go winless? No problem. You, too, can be a playoff team. Fortunately, most schools have a policy in place that prevents them from entering the postseason with a sub-par record.

When to comes to making its playoff brackets, District 10 wins the award for idiocy.

Before the district even determines which teams will play and which will opt-out, it makes a bracket and seeds teams by record.

OK. So far, so good.

When teams inform the district they will not be entering the playoffs, they are scratched off the list.

But instead of redrawing and reseeding the bracket based on the teams that ARE playing, the district just wipes its hands of the whole mess and leaves the bracket as-is, assigning “byes” to teams who suddenly no longer have an opponent.

What ensues is chaos.

High seeds sometimes have to play first-round games while lower seeds get a bye because the team they were bracketed to play decided to opt-out.

It's all luck of the draw. Get paired with a school that says, 'No mas?' Congrats, you get a bye.

Unlucky enough to get paired with a team that wants to play anyway. Sorry. No bye for you.

It is a double-edged sword. Perhaps playing that extra game is beneficial to some teams.

That's not the point, though.

In no playoff system should a sixth-seed get a bye while a No. 1 seed doesn't.

I don't know if that can be considered unnecessarily complicated, but it is unnecessarily stupid.

No district is perfect. The PIAA isn't perfect (just look at some of its playoff sites). But some decisions make you wonder if common sense is a lost art.

Mike Kilroy is a staff writer for the Butler Eagle.