How to suggest to my state to change their conference selections?

You’re over complicating it with your different terms: byes, Auto Q, A vs B standards, etc.

You need 3 qualifying marks: conference, region, state. For example, for the 1600 you might have 4:40, 4:30, and 4:25 as your auto marks. A kid who runs 4:28 can automatically enter your conference and region meets, but would have to qualify on place to the state meet at the region meet.

The best part of this system is that a kid who has qualified early in the 3200m doesn’t have to run it in all three post season meets. It also gives coaches a chance to sit out an auto qualifying kid and improve the chances of a teammate making it through via place.

A couple of thoughts....

You should check on your state association's mission. Probably it says something about geographic representation at the state championship, and not just having the best kids there. Some states take that part very seriously. They may just think it's more important to have kids from all parts of the state rather than the fourth best from conference X who happens to be the 6th best in the state or whatever.

If you want to propose adding extra kids to the regional/state championships, how will that affect both schedules and finances? How many extra heats can realistically be added.

If you have auto-qualifying marks does your state regularly have the type of equipment at meets where these marks may be generated to make such a system workable. e.g. Do they have wind meters at every meet, or are you going to get 20 auto qualifiers in the 100m and long jump at meet X with a 30 mph tailwind?

I'm not trying to be too much of a wet blanket, just thinking of obstacles you should think of before putting forth a proposal.

For XC, I’ve had the idea of having certain weekends/meets count as points. Whichever meet teams choose that weekend will count toward their record against other teams in their classification. Use either win percentage or total number of wins as the determining factor for an At-Large advancement to the state meet. Teams can only qualify for the At Large if they competed as a full team at the regional meet.

You both bring up some great points. I need some people to help me refine this because it's just a jumble of ideas I've had over the past 4 years.

I think the focus should be on track for now. XC is it's own different qualification system that has it's own problems, not to mention a time qualifier for XC could very easily be abused by a short course.

The way it works in my state is that every track event except 800,1600,3200, and 4x8 have a prelim in addition to the final. All of the prelims are maintained to two heats with the number of qualifiers.

2 prelim heats of 8 for the sprints, 1 final heat of 8 for the sprints. The aforementioned distance events have 1 final of 16 athletes.

I don't think adding more athletes should really happen, but that the athletes should be the fastest in the field. The best way to do this would just be to invite the top 16 fastest athletes. But there's no way I could ever get that proposal through.

I like the idea of qualification meets, and it some ways it does allow kids from worse off schools to go head to head against some bigger competition and maybe prove themselves. That goes hand in hand with what you're saying if there's some high performance meet that only certain schools are going to, it kinda skews the results.

I guess what I'm really looking to do is reorganize the districts so that they're fair, rather than change the qualification process. There already is an auto Q for conference in. If you run faster than the 8th place time at state the year prior, you automatically get to run at conference. The issue is that this rule really doesn't do anything than let the teams with fast kids put more kids into the races. Instead of the 2 athletes per school that is normally allocated, they can put a third one in if they have hit the standard.

In swimming in our state, if you hit a certain mark you qualify for state. No ifs ands or buts. There needs to be a way to translate this to track and field without the extraneous heats that swimming has. No one wants to watch 4 heats of the 3200.

So I think a combination of qualification meets and a time standard could work well. Like Koalafier was saying, if you hit a certain time you can run at the district meet, but you'd still have to qualify in the top 4 if you weren't fast enough to auto Q to state.

The issue would be what times to make these standards. Maybe the top 8 auto Q for conference like is already in place, top 6 for districts, then top 4 for state. There could also be a normalized time standard from the past 6-10 years or so in case there's a meet with extremely poor weather or something that would skew the times.

Just throwing out there that in high school our team went undefeated, and won the city-wide championship over 32 other schools.

Then our state qualifier had us travel hours to run against schools we'll only see at state. We didn't qualify.

In Virginia, the state standards are adjusted annually by taking the previous state standard times 5, plus the most recent 8th place finisher, all divided by 6. By weighting the previous standard so heavily in the calculation, no single year throws off the standard by too much.

These standards can be reached at any invitational meet with a certain number of teams (I believe it’s 5 if there is FAT timing, and 10 if there is not). They do not require wind gauges ( or anyone regulating the jump pit depths, which really aids performance!) because most meets do not have them. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a meet with an abnormally high amount of qualifiers due to wind.

I don’t know that it’s a perfect system, but it works very well.

I was raised in a state that only used place qualifiers in the post season. One year I watched the states top sprinter false start in his district meet in the 100m, and his season was suddenly over. Clearly he’d have had the standard and moved on in a time-qualifying system.