Notes from latest NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Track and Field and Cross Country Committee:
The committee continued discussing the directive from the Division I Championships Finance Review Working Group to explore a cross country regional qualifying model with fewer sites and fewer participants for potential implementation as early as 2022. The committee noted the concerns from numerous conference coaching bodies with the proposed five-region, 80-team model aligned by conference. The committee noted that competitive equity, increased travel costs to sponsoring institutions, increased missed class time, increased competition – which is detrimental to cross country athletes who compete across three sports and three seasons – and the impact of consolidating altitude schools with non-altitude schools within the concept were among concerns expressed.
Given this feedback and the charge from the working group, the committee discussed alternative models and began exploring a concept that they wish to be shared for membership feedback before sharing as a proposal to the working group and the Competition Oversight Committee.
Committee members began formulating this new concept based on the feedback received and because they feel they have exhausted the options to identify an at-large selection process that is fair, trusted, equitable and financially feasible for the cross country regional championships. The newly discussed concept would implement qualifying criteria/standards to be eligible to compete at the NCAA cross country regional championships and would be modeled as follows:
1) Five-site model with eight regions.
o Two sites (West and Mountain) would each consist of only one of the eight regions with one men’s race and one women’s race. One item to note here is that this would keep altitude schools together in one region and would prevent the West Coast/non-altitude schools from going to altitude or across regional lines (increasing travel).
o Three sites (Midwest/South/Northeast) would each consist of two of the eight regions and would have two men’s races and two women’s races at each site since technically two regions would be competing there.
(2) Develop qualifying criteria/standards to earn entry into the regional championships. (This develops qualifying requirements while also reducing the number of competitors at the regional championships.)
o Require schools to have at least a .500 record with a minimum number of total opponents during the regular season (the total number of opponents needs to be reviewed further to determine the right number, but if for example 40 opponents were required, no team with less than a 20-20 record could earn access to the regional championships), and;
o Teams would be required to finish in the top two-thirds of their conference.
▪ If a team finishes in the top two-thirds of its conference but does not have a .500 record it could not go to the regional championships.
▪ If a team has a .500 record but does not finish in the top two-thirds of its conference, it could not go to the regional championships.
▪ Teams that win their conference earn an automatic bid to the regional championships even if they do not have a .500 record.
o Individual student-athletes are not able to qualify to the regional championships if they do not finish in the top 25 of their conference meet.
While the committee does not feel this concept is better than the current nine-region model that is being used, members do feel this is the best concept they could devise that addresses qualifying standards, fewer sites and fewer participants as requested by the Division I Championships Finance Review Working Group.
The committee will continue to explore and consider additional details.