How sites are chosen. Each half has four semistates, one per class, and four host sites, so every host gets exactly one class. A host school that is in a semistate field plays at home. Otherwise the four classes are placed to keep total driving miles for all 16 teams as low as possible, with one adjustment: every mile past 95 on any team’s trip counts six times over, so the IHSAA’s habit of sparing one team a very long drive is built in.

Built from past IHSAA assignments. That rule was fit to every semistate assignment we could read from 2018 through 2025. Since 2024 (four teams per semistate, one class per site) it matched 14 of 16 sites; the only miss was the 2024 North swap of 4A and 3A between Huntington North and Plymouth. From 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2023, when two classes shared each site, it matched all 32 class placements. Total driving miles alone matched only 8 of the 16 recent sites. This is a projection; the IHSAA announces the real assignments after the regional championships.

Confidence. Host: a host school plays at home. Strong: the next-best arrangement costs 60+ more miles. Likely: 25 to 60. Toss-up: under 25, shown with the alternate site. Each host card also lists the semistates it held in past seasons.

Site Odds. For each team, the rest of its half is drawn 200 times, with each regional’s winner drawn by its odds from the official IHSAA bracket and the ratings of record (finished matches locked in), and the site rule runs on every draw with that team as its regional champion. Each draw’s projected site gets the share its confidence label earned against the IHSAA’s real assignments from 2018 to 2025 (Host 100%, Strong 92%, Likely 91%, Toss-up 83%), and the rest is spread over the other hosts, most to the ones that add the fewest extra miles. Those rates come from 48 placements, so read them as rough.

Distances. Driving miles from each school to each host site, from OpenStreetMap road data. They can differ from Google Maps by a few miles on rural routes.