No more D1 Track regionals?

BBJ wrote:

I'm confused. How many people will get in to nationals in each running event -- 8? Why would they run one heat of 8 in the finals of the Sweet 16? Isn't that basically just the national championship race, and a really small one at that?

Am I missing something?

In events that require a semi-final there will be two heats of eight. In events that can handle 16 competitors at once, the 5k, the 10k, and the steeplechase, it will be a straight final of 16.

What a fantastic experience the Super64 will be for developing athletes! The youngsters (frosh and sophs) will get to go against and see the best in the country in a straight up race. Head to head competition - not descending order lists - are the way to go.

distance pirate wrote:

I heard that they will make everyone run in turkey suits and that Skuj will be employed by the NCAA to personally blow every champion.

B---S--t.

I owe morning runner an apology... I'm the jerk.

Personally, I don't like the new idea. While it solves inequity issues, it creates too many other problems (changig flights is REALLY expensive on short notice, mid-majors will really get screwed).

Re-drawing the regions is better.

People on the semester system may be done with classes by mid-May, but not those on the quarter system.

Perhaps the NCAA is forgetting about the "student" part of being a student-athlete? Those on the quarter system would be missing a ridiculous amount of school right before finals in order to be at the regional/national meets.

Just another thought to add to the many reasons why this is a bad idea. I'm sure the coaches will not vote favourably on this proposal.

a few points to consider wrote:

What a fantastic experience the Super64 will be for developing athletes! The youngsters (frosh and sophs) will get to go against and see the best in the country in a straight up race. Head to head competition - not descending order lists - are the way to go.

The NCAA Championships should be used to determine who is the best runners/jumpers/throwers in the nation, not to develop athletes. Gosh, now days everybody that had a hint of talent in high school thinks they deserve to run against the best runners in the nation when they go to college.

64 is still too many participants to find out who will be on the podium (the only thing that matters when it comes to championship races). Anybody that is fit enough and good enough to be top 8 in the NCAA's, should have no problem posting a top 24 time over the course of the whole season....which leads to my proposal:

Only top 24 marks even get invited to the NCAA meet (no regionals, no long-ass 11 day meet) - this will make for easy set ups of semi-finals / finals in 100-1500 events (and field) and finals of 3000sc, 5000, and 10000 which will probably have around 16-20 participants because not everybody will declare to run (not everybody invited in more than one distance event will double/triple)

I should get like a job promotion... to NCAA-master

This has got to be the most half baked idea I have seen in a long time. To put coaches thru the hassle of planning out this 11 day (more likely it will be closer to 14 days depending on when you first run, where you fly in from, etc) mess is just beyond me. Also, what if a parent would want to watch their son or daughter compete at this meet. Do they plan to come to the qualifying part, or wait to the final? They don't qaulify to the final, but they did not come out for the qualifying, then the miss that. How many parents can block out 11 days (at least that) to watch. This is bad on so many levels.

I am not saying that t&f is anything like the other major sports in college. But almost every other sport no matter how big or small your conference is gets an automatic bid to the national meet. Will most of these small school get beat by alot at nationals yes, but every now and again there will be the george mason. Is it a large chunk of time taken out yes, but other national championships take up just as much time. Will I be upset if my small conference kid gets a chance to run a 5k because mcdougal cant double no, gives my kid a chance. The only real downside to me is the price that may have to be paid. Despite what you people are saying about the regionals if I am from the new england area and regionals are in florida I am probably flying to them. There is also a chance that most smaller schools would know that there athletes are not qualifying to the sweet 16 and would just book tickets for the super 64, and if the NCAA is going to pick up the tab if you make it to the sweet 16 then the burden of changing your tickets is not on you. Thus the financial burden may not be as big as people are making it out to be.

a few points to consider wrote:

BBJ wrote:

I'm confused. How many people will get in to nationals in each running event -- 8? Why would they run one heat of 8 in the finals of the Sweet 16? Isn't that basically just the national championship race, and a really small one at that?

Am I missing something?

In events that require a semi-final there will be two heats of eight. In events that can handle 16 competitors at once, the 5k, the 10k, and the steeplechase, it will be a straight final of 16.

What a fantastic experience the Super64 will be for developing athletes! The youngsters (frosh and sophs) will get to go against and see the best in the country in a straight up race. Head to head competition - not descending order lists - are the way to go.

Im still confused, or at least just think it's stupid.

So in the 10k and 5k and steeple, there will be 64 racing in the round of 64, and then what, 32 racing in the sweet 16 to see which 16 go to nationals? That would make sense, except then do you run heats at nationals to whittle that down to 8 for the NCAA final??

why not make a fifth region, rework the current regions to accomadate the population and cut the auto spots to top 4 instead of 5. Something Like Northeast, Southeast, Mideast, Midwest and West. Or keep the regionals now but put just shift everything to the left a little bit. Shift a few schools from the east to mideast, then the mideast shift the most western schools to the midwest, and keep that up until the west gets the surplus.

Years ago there was no such thing as regionals. You qualified for the NCAA based on time, and then your coach and school decided whether to take you or not. A lot of schools didn't take everyone who qualified if they felt that they didn't have a realistic chance to score points. I thought regionals was instituted partially to eliminate people chasing difficulr qualifying times the whole season instead of actrually racing.

seems like the qualifying time standards work well for D2 from my experience. I would run a race, hope to get or improve my time and stay on the list. when i didn't make it in (with my provisional time) i couldn't blame anyone but myself for not running fast enough.

Salt is my jam what can i say wrote:

Why is the sky blue?

The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange, and yellow light is affected by the air. However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.

i like the intent, but here are some issues:

1) Conference champs getting automatic qualification is (it seems to me) simply a carrot to get everyone to go along with the plan...there is no logic to allowing this - the NCAA meet should field the best athletes not the best athletes + those from weak conferences who won.

2) any type of regional qualifying system is going to have imbalances (usually in specific events) so this plan does work to solve that problem (provided they drop the Conference champ idea - cause the ligit confernce champs will make it and the not-so-good conference champs won't).

but the idea of qualifying 64 is questionable...the size makes the whole event cumbersome. If they want to eliminate regionals (which is essentially what this plan proposes - then go ahead and do it) but i agree with an earlier post about only qualifying 24 to 32. (that alone saves several days of meet time and at least 1 round of qualifying).

3) any new plan cannot interfere with the ability of athlete to double, triple, etc. so the fewer rounds of qualifying the better.

4) seems like this attempt to make it like basketball (field of 64/ sweet 16) is not the best way for our sport to go. I mean do they do this indoor - no...perhaps the best soltion is to model the outdoor qualifying much like the indoor system since it seems to work just fine by putting the best athletes at the meet over a reasonble number of days.

atomic party chair wrote:

Perhaps the NCAA is forgetting about the "student" part of being a student-athlete? Those on the quarter system would be missing a ridiculous amount of school right before finals in order to be at the regional/national meets.

I think those schools using the 1/4 system should just change to the semester system. It makes more sense for those schools to change than to move the proposed track meet.

NCAA-master wrote:

Only top 24 marks even get invited to the NCAA meet (no regionals, no long-ass 11 day meet) - this will make for easy set ups of semi-finals / finals in 100-1500 events (and field) and finals of 3000sc, 5000, and 10000 which will probably have around 16-20 participants because not everybody will declare to run (not everybody invited in more than one distance event will double/triple)

This is the best idea so far. Why even have a regionals? There is no regionals for USA Nats. The only thing is, the above model will encourage time-trialing rather than racing. A solution would be to take the top 16 plus the conference winner from each conference. Either way, regionals may not be necessary

As stated before there used to not even be a regional system. It was run X time to qualify to the National Meet. That's it. It was that way for years. Regionals was put together so runners and teams could actually race instead of chasing qualifying times all year.

For the distance races....am I reading this right: "Each even has a field of 64...3000st has 2 competitions in the 64 and 1 in the 16...5000m/10000m has 1 competiton each in the 64 and 16" So, for the 5k/10k there would be one race of 64 entries in the super 64, and then the top 16 qualify for the super 16. In the 3000st there would be two races of 32 in the super 64, and then the top 8 from each heat qualify for the super 16.

Interesting....how would you get 64 on the starting line? You could stand 2 people in a lane pretty easily, but even that would be 4 deep. Squeeze 3 across a lane and you've got it 3 deep in places.

Alan

The NCAA should be used to develop athletes; the USAT&F national championships/Olympic Trials should be used to determine the best runners in the nation. The college system is a great way to develop young talent so that they can get racing experience and professional coaching while attending school. To say that the NCAA meet is only to determine the best runners in the nation is ludicrous. If that is the case, then Alan Webb, Chris Lukezic, and Teg should all be at the NCAA meet, instead of the top developing runners in the nation.

People should understand that this proposal was put together by USTFCCCA because the NCAA already rejected a proposal last year that would have realigned the regions so that they were more fair.

Contrary to what some posters seem to think, the goal of that realignment was to reduce the problem of having the same number of people make nationals from the soft regions as in the harder regions. With the same number going from each region, but far more qualifiers competing for those slots in the E and ME, some runners (throwers, jumpers) were getting shafted simply by being in a tough region.

So the coaches proposed a realignment that had almost unanimous support (something like 209 to 18), but the NCAA championships committee shot it down. Two of the stated objections were:

1. They felt that the realignment was unfair to athletes in the West. Of course, the fact that these athletes already had an unfair advantage was EXACTLY the problem that realignment was aimed at.

2. The NCAA wants sports with as many participants as track to advance conference champions. Of course, this will also create inequities. Some conference champ who runs 9:29 in the steeple will go to the Super 64 and get slaughtered, while a 9:08 guy from a tough conference sits home. But, with about 30 conference champions in DI, that still leaves room for more than 30 time qualifiers to Super 64, so I don't think this is a big deal.

So, having had regional realignment shot down by NCAA, the USTFCCA developed this plan. I think it looks pretty reasonable. It really is not too different from the current system, just combining the regionals and nationals into one 11 day span at a single site. Universities have to pay to feed and house their athletes between regionals and nationals as it it is now, but NCAA will pick up a bigger proportion of the tab with this system.

This system (like regionals) will also help reduce the problem of making the track season into a big exercise in chasing qualifying marks. That was a huge drawback to the the method of just taking top 30 to nationals. That system killed the dual meet in US track, which is certainly one reason that no one comes to our meets anymore. The other reason is that the meet schedules are just WAY too slow. Even die hard fans don't want to sit around for 10 minutes watching nothing between races.

Runningart2004 wrote:

For the distance races....am I reading this right: "Each even has a field of 64...3000st has 2 competitions in the 64 and 1 in the 16...5000m/10000m has 1 competiton each in the 64 and 16" So, for the 5k/10k there would be one race of 64 entries in the super 64, and then the top 16 qualify for the super 16. In the 3000st there would be two races of 32 in the super 64, and then the top 8 from each heat qualify for the super 16.

Interesting....how would you get 64 on the starting line? You could stand 2 people in a lane pretty easily, but even that would be 4 deep. Squeeze 3 across a lane and you've got it 3 deep in places.

Alan

Not quite. Remember that the "Super 64" would be split up into four groups using serpentine seeding. So for the 5K/10K, there would be four heats with 16 runners in each heat on the first weekend. 16 runners from those heats would advance to the final the next weekend.

For the steeple, you would have four heats of 16 runners, then two heats of 16 runners on the first weekend. A final consisting of 16 runners would be held the second weekend.

One question I have is how qualifiers are determined for the next round? Will they have a set number from each heat (e.g. in the 10K, top four from each heat make the final), or will there be a time factor like there is currently?

sc42 wrote:

This system (like regionals) will also help reduce the problem of making the track season into a big exercise in chasing qualifying marks. That was a huge drawback to the the method of just taking top 30 to nationals. That system killed the dual meet in US track, which is certainly one reason that no one comes to our meets anymore. The other reason is that the meet schedules are just WAY too slow. Even die hard fans don't want to sit around for 10 minutes watching nothing between races.

is there any evidence that the regionals system has sparked a renewal of important dual meets? is there any evidence that it has increased interest in the sport at the collegiate level?

every system has qualifying marks. in this proposal, you have simply shifted the bar lower. top 64 (or really 75 or so) is a much a lower bar than the old top 18 (really 25 or so) and a meaningfully lower bar than the top 24-32 (really 35-40 or so) that i and others have promoted on this thread.

what makes people think that coaches will do less time-chasing in their schedule if the bar is (arbitrarily) set where this proposal sets it? the difference in the sprint events is minimal or non-existent. same for throws and jumps. for the 800 or 1500 what are we talking about, 3/4 of a second or a 1 second in the 800 and perhaps 1.25 to 2 seconds in the 1500? that difference is going to cause a coach to put his top athletes in a dual meet with sit and kick races over a time qualifying meet? please.

so that leaves the steeple, 5,000 and 10,000. the 10,000 wasn't even a part of regionals initially (is it now?). does it really make sense to design a system around eliminating the need for a fast 5,000 during the collegiate season? do we really want to eliminate the chance for top but not outstanding collegiate distance runners to run a fast 5,000?

moving the standard to 24-32 will certainly allow any contender for the top 3 at NCAAs to qualify on his own and won't meaningfully change the incentive structure for coaches. it's not like many (if any) teams would fly all over the country week after week chasing standards. every once in a while a very good athlete would struggle at a qualifying meet in the mid to late season and have to rearrange plans to try again. more often the top guys achieved the standards in the regular course of their season.