Changes coming in NCAA track

The path to becoming an All-American in track and field will be redefined in 2010.

Visiting with coaches Leon Johnson and Mike Heimerman this morning, it was fascinating to hear the NCAA will streamline the qualification process for the Outdoor Championships after this spring.

For years, athletes had to reach an automatic standard to qualify for the national meet, and the field was filled out by the highest ranking competitors who met an easier provisional standard that still wasn't duck soup. That system remains in place for NCAA Indoor qualification.

Only a few years ago, the NCAA adjusted the outdoor process. It established a system with four regional meets, and qualifying standards that were in most cases even less demanding than the old provisional standards, to assure enough competition at the regionals. There still were automatic qualifiers who would advance to nationals even if they didn't do well at regionals.

That won't happen after next year. There will be two regional qualifying meets, basically (except for Louisiana and Arkansas heading east) with the country divided along the Mississippi River.

The top performers at the two regional meets advance to the national meet. Nobody else does. Get the job done at the regional qualifiers, or be done with the season. Fair enough - it makes head to head competition the determining factor.

It doesn't really matter, but for some reason the NCAA won't call these the East Regional and the West Regional championships. They'll be called something else - why, I can't wait to hear.

But input from coaches and administrators, and lots of number crunching by the hard-working NCAA staff, determined this new format is improved and provides more fair selection of those competitors most deserving of a chance to become an All-American and win a national championship.

That's one wonderful aspect of track and field -- there is nothing subjective about earning All-America honors. Those go to the top eight overall finishers in each event at the national championships, as well as to the top eight American-born finishers in each event.

I'd imagine the new format will reduce the number of competitors advancing past conference championships, but just a cursory glance at results for the past few years indicated there were more athletes at the regional meets who had no chance to get to nationals than there were national-class athletes being left at home after the top five regional finishers advanced to nationals.

For example, out west, year after year there are, for whatever reason, very few national class sprinters. In the Midwest and Mideast Regions, there are far more than five good ones, and the East Region has also been much deeper than the West.

So the field of qualifiers at nationals wasn't really balanced. There were some qualifiers from out west, and sometimes also to the east, who weren't better than athletes from the midsection of the country left on the sideline after regionals.

This new system seems on track to fixing that.