Meet The Bubble. It is the page you check every morning in late May when your team is sitting in the eleventh seed of a sixteen team class and the math is nervous. It is also the page your aunt who has not been to a game since 1994 will text you about, because she saw it on Facebook and now she has opinions about the regional one seed. Welcome to the bracket race, scored every night and rendered like a TV banner.
Lacrosse, baseball, and softball all run the same MPA Heal Points qualification system. Top two thirds of teams in each region (or in each class for lacrosse, since lacrosse skips the North/South split) make the tournament. The line moves every night as games finish. The Bubble draws that line in three colors so a coach can scan it on a phone in a fluorescent gym hallway and know the answer in three seconds.
How to read it.
Three columns per bracket. Locked, the comfortably safe seeds. On The Bubble, the three teams hugging the cutoff line. Outside Looking In, the teams below the line who need a win and somebody else's loss. Each row shows the official MPA rank, the team's record, the TI value (the Heal Points number that drives the rank), and how many regular season games are still on their schedule. A signed distance from the cutoff line tells you exactly how far above or below the cut a team is right now.
Lacrosse runs separate brackets for boys and girls. So the lacrosse Bubble shows six bucket cards (Class A, B, C across both genders). Baseball and softball each get eight (Class A through D, North and South). One tab per bucket. Auto sorted to whichever bucket you were looking at last.
What it looks like in the wild today.
Lacrosse Boys Class A: 18 teams, top 12 qualify. Cape Elizabeth holds the number one Heal Points seed at TI 6.02. Thornton Academy is second at 5.92. South Portland, Deering, and Falmouth all sit at TI 4.08, splitting the third through fifth seeds based on tiebreakers. Note that this is the MPA Heal Points (TI) number, not PIR. The Bubble is about who actually qualifies for the bracket, which is decided by Heal Points, not by power rating.
Girls Class A: 21 teams, 14 qualify. Kennebunk holds the top seed at TI 4.95 after three straight wins. South Portland and Windham both sit at TI 3.98 in the second and third spots. Down in Class C girls, ten teams in the bucket, top seven make it. Wells leads the entire girls field at TI 9.77, the highest Heal Points number in the entire sport. Maranacook/Winthrop is second at 7.83. The cutoff sits at the seventh seed, currently Waynflete at TI 0.00 — they are mathematically on the line and a single win moves them safely above it.
Baseball is three weeks in with sixty five games played. The line moves every doubleheader. Lake Region (B South), George Stevens Academy (C North), Messalonskee (A North), Oxford Hills (A North), and Wells (B South) currently sit in the top five by Heal Points (TI). Most of them are locked in by the math but the schedule is long and the math is not done.
Cutoff math, plain English.
Lacrosse: ceil of two thirds, no minimum. A class with 21 teams qualifies the top 14, a class with 10 qualifies the top 7. Baseball and softball: same two thirds rule, but the field gets filled to a minimum of 8 teams when the region has at least 8 (the MPA bulletin spells this out). Tiebreakers everywhere are head to head first, then a play in game on a neutral field for the last qualifying spot, with a coin flip deciding home court.
Why this is sticky.
Most coaches we have talked to keep a rough version of this math in a notebook. Most parents keep it on the back of an envelope in the truck. Most fans keep it in the wrong direction. The Bubble runs the actual numbers, refreshed every night after the nightly orchestrator finishes. Whether your team is locked in or holding on by a fingernail, this page will tell you. And if you are 9th of 12 in a bucket where 12 qualify, you are not 'in.' You are on The Bubble. The page is there to keep us all honest about that.
Now go check your team.