Seeding (sports)

In sport, seeding is the practice of separating the most skilled competitors from each other in the early rounds of a tournament. Players or teams are "planted" into the bracket in such a manner that the best do not meet until later in the competition, usually based on ranking from the regular season. The term was first used in tennis,^[1] and is based on the notion of scattering the top players' names across the bracket in the way that a sower scatters seeds.

Sometimes the remaining competitors in a single-elimination tournament will be "re-seeded" so that the highest surviving seed is made to play the lowest surviving seed in the next round, the second-highest plays the second-lowest, etc. This may be done after each round, or only at selected intervals.^[2]

^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (2002), Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Page 2737, ISBN 0-19-860457-2
^ [1] Archived 2015-09-18 at the Wayback Machine

[1] Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (2002), Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Page 2737, ISBN 0-19-860457-2

[2] [1] Archived 2015-09-18 at the Wayback Machine

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