How to qualify for the First Rounds/Region Prelims?

why is there air?

I repeat:
As conference meets seem scheduled within the prescribed qualifying window you can post a qualifying mark for NCAA at conference meet. (Read the manual)

But to be clear, where you place in a conference meet does not affect qualifying for NCAA regional meet. The time you run can improve your regional ranking if it is better than what you posted earlier in the season. Whether that is good enough to qualify is a different question. (Read the manual).

I repeat:

Why call them conferences then? (Reread my replies)

Woke up on the wrong side of the bed, did we?

How did you get into college?

To help qualify for the championships, which is more than can be said about conferences

You're really focused on my academic life. It's nice that you want to emulate me so much

How many qualify to nationals? Is it based on event like last year?

not to pile on but..... they call them "conferences" because all schools from one "conference" go there to race for "conference" championships.

Maybe I phrased my question poorly. I'm trying to say that the conference championships seem to stand by themselves, in that they technically fall outside the regular season, but don't have any elimination-based effect on the national championship. By that extent, it seems pointless to have them other than just to see who's the best in the conference. There's a lot that goes into them it seems AND they're NCAA official events, so it's weird that there's no official purpose to them (elimination-based competition). My point is that you might as well call them whatever you like if theyre not elimination based and invite teams from all over instead of restricting it to a region. More competition would be better, no?

narunner;

In the old days, winning conference gave you an auto place at regionals. Presumably it was abandoned as some conference results were slow, someone could win their conference but not really be fast enough for the Regional meet, where others got in by time, which was an auto time, not a descending order list. There are potential issues with either scenario. Getting an auto time early, meant that you could train for the Regional meet, not have to keep racing if you are on the time bubble. But it also meant that you had to get into meets like Mt. SAC or Stanford (for 5k/10k) to get the competition required to run fast enough to get auto.

The descending order list (48 times declared) keeps it somewhat equal (although no system is perfect), then Regionals (as said above) is elimination only, although non-auto (places) have time qualifiers as well? or is it just place? (can't recall).

I approve of the current system, but it seems that having official conference meets nowadays is a bit pointless. You could just have really big meets so you could get some good competition for qualifying times instead

They exist. Bryan Clay, Raleigh Relays, Penn Relays, Various Stanford events, etc.

Teams celebrate Conference Championships!

Damn this has gone on too long so I'll try to explain a little better.

Conference meets are held to see who the conference champion is. They have no bearing on the national championships unless someone runs a qualifying time in them. The reason for having them is simple: the NCAA is built upon conference meets in other sports, and the conference meet gives institutions a chance to compete against their rival institutions and get a look at how they stack up program-wise. It is the peak of competition for the 97% of athletes not making it to regionals/nationals. This is what they peak for, because their coach and team is evaluated by their athletic department based on their performance here.

Ic4A/ECAC is a little different. First off, it is the 'historic' conference, in that it encompasses teams on the east coast who used to compete in intercollegiate athletics before the NCAA. The meet in OUTDOOR acts as more of a last-chance qualifier meet for athletes to get together and run fast...but it is also a championship meet where they crown individual and team champions. Recently a lot of teams have been opting to send athletes to different "last-chance" meets instead as they have pacers and better races because they don't have the "conference championship" type vibe which makes athletes run tactical sometimes.

In INDOOR, Ic4A/ECAC falls outside the indoor qualifying window, and is held at BU, the most desirable place to race during the indoor season. This leads it to being much more similar to the NIT tournament in basketball, think like a sub-national meet for teams who want one more race in peak shape. This year a girl ran 2:02 in the 800, but couldn't go to nationals because it was the same weekend.

Conference championships are leftover from the old system. Some schools may care, while others don't. Most NCAA sports have conference championships, which keeps the AD in touch with rivalry results - since Duals really don't exist anymore for Track. Ultimately head coaches are trying to please the AD (who pays the coach).

But yes, conference championships are not as big a deal in Track anymore as in other sports, in general. But don't tell that to those teams who win their conferences.

Athletic directors base their head coach's success on conference championship team performance. They do not care about national performance unless they make the national championships AND score.

Coaching staff care about their athletes success, but they also care about their job too. So they prioritize conference championship point scoring even if it means running athletes in a lot of events.

If you are in a major conference, odds are the top people in the race will run a regional qualifying level time. You almost certainly have to in order to sniff the podium or score. Unless we are maybe talking the 10k/5k.....in that case you are screwed if you didn't pop-off at Stanford or Bryan Clay.

If you are in a mid-major conference you are probably screwed if you don't have a time coming in. WCC schools are kind of chill because they don't actually have a track conference championship. In that case, they get to assemble for a last chance style meet. They have an advantage in terms of qualifying for regionals.

I think conference champions should still get an auto-bid to the regional meet. Who cares if it bumps out the #40-48 dude in an event? Most likely they wouldn't be a factor anyways. My money is on a dude who knows how to win races over a #48 guy on the descending order list to have a breakthrough anyways. The winners from other top conferences already have their times going in too, so they won't bump people out. Just makes conference championships have even higher stakes imo.

Another quick point that should be made is that not all times are comparable. Take races at different altitudes for example. Should one athlete be punished for running at a school in the mountains while a worse runner runs faster at their sea level school?

Or consider a really good runner who goes to a school too poor to be taking them across the country to fast meets. Seems like they're out of luck, as well.

Someone already commented that no system is perfect, but this one actually seems pretty flawed. The worst thing that could come out of conference auto bids is regional meets that are a bit over populated.

But my suggestion is why not have a third qualifier between conference and the prelims that also does auto bids, if they're already doing weird meets like the IC4A? Lots of potential to better the system, as far as I'm concerned

This is got to be one of the dumbest responses ever. Why call them Conferences? Clearly you never competed in athletics in college or you would know how important conference championships are.

This post reeks of smarmy parmby piety, because the NCAA itself has helped destroy historical long-standing interconference rivalries by shuffling schools around to various conferences, chasing the media dollars. The first big tell was when the Big Eight was no longer.