Someone who knows more things wrote:
Well essentially it's the last three meets. However the meets need to be an accepted distance (5k and over for women, 6k and over for men). The races also have to be single gender to be counted. So my calling it an a squad was probably a poor term and thanks for catching that. An example of a race not factoring into the last three would be the Cornell Reif 5k. I believe Ithaca and cortland ran some people there. It doesn't count for men as its too short and it can't be counted for the women as both genders competed in the same race.
Ah. The whole nationals deal seems so arbitrary to me. If they really want to count out-of-region competition, shouldn't they have an actual established point system like d1, so at least coaches would have an idea of just how to appeal to the qualifying process?
ANd then of course we have all those damn awful South teams taking up 2 spots from good regions (Midwest, AR, and Mid Atlantic come to mind, depending somewhat on the year.)