When the IHSAA announced the brackets for the girls basketball sectional games, Roosevelt was missing from the Class 3A Griffith Sectional.
Instead of a six-team sectional, the bracket showed just five teams.
IHSAA commissioner Bobby Cox said that Roosevelt didn't register online along with the other 399 schools that will be in the tournament, and didn't respond to repeated phone calls or emails from the association.
"Under our rules, you can enter up to 48 hours late (of the Wednesday entry deadline), and when the 48 hours passes, you are not eligible to enter the tournament," Cox said. "Even if they had contacted us, we'd have let them in, but we get all the way to draw day, and we still haven't heard from them.
"They were not drawn into the tournament, because there was no way for us to know if they have a basketball team, maybe they didn't want to play."
Cox said that a Roosevelt teams were entered in the fall tournaments and that a wrestler was entered already this winter.
Roosevelt coach Lani Edmonds wouldn't comment about the draw, and she said the new athletic director was Brandon Wesby, who couldn't be reached late Sunday.
Griffith athletic director Bill Crowley said that he received four rosters last week from the IHSAA -- for Hammond, Gavit, Clark and Lew Wallace -- and immediately inquired about the missing team. However, he said that when he tried to reach administrators at Roosevelt, his calls went unanswered as the school was closed late last week with heating issues.
"I didn't know anything official, and I was surprised when I turned on the draw," Crowley said.
Hammond will play Gavit in the first game, with the winner playing Clark in one semifinal. Lew Wallace and Griffith received the bye into the other semifinal game.
At River Forest, Greater South Shore Conference champion Bishop Noll will play the only nonconference team in the bracket, defending champion Bowman Academy in the opening round.
For the Warriors to meet GSSC second-place team Whiting, both would have to reach the championship. The Oilers drew the bye into the semifinals and will play the winner of River Forest vs. Wheeler.
The Class 4A sectional hosted at Munster put defending champion E.C. Central and runner-up Lake Central on the same side of the bracket with favored West Side.
The Cougars will meet the Indians in a first-round game at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 6. Lake Central has reached the sectional final each of the last five seasons. The winner of that game will meet the winner of E.C. Central vs. host Munster in the semifinal.
"I think this is a brand new year, and I don't think that we've taken for granted anything that's gone on before us at all," first-year Indians coach Marc Urban said. "So we're not going to think about the past, we're going to worry about what we have right now."
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