The NCAA selection committee chose 32 cross country teams on Sunday to receive at-large bids to both the men's and women's NCAA Championship meet, which takes place this Saturday at Wilmington College in West Chester, Ohio. It marked the first time the new system was used, and so far it has received mixed reviews.
From the eight regions that comprise the NCAA, the top two teams in each regional championship meet received automatic bids to Nationals, while teams finishing third through fifth gain eligibility to receive an at-large bid. From those 24 eligible teams, the selection committee chose 16 to head to the national meet.
That leaves eight teams on the outside looking in, including the Tufts men's team.
At the New England Regional meet, the men's team placed fifth in their region with 180 points - 16 points behind third-place Trinity. Both Trinity and fourth-place Wesleyan received at-large bids. The Jumbos are among four or five bubble teams with strong r?©sum?©s that were left out of the national meet.
"It isn't anybody's fault," said men's cross country coach Ethan Barron, who was disappointed to see his team left out of Saturday's meet. "With a system of this nature, there are people involved, and there has to be, and there's going to be some level of subjectivity that allows for debate."
A look across the nation illustrates this well. Colorado College took fourth in regional championship meet, six points out of third place Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. Claremont received one of the 16 at-large bids, while Colorado College did not.
Colorado College coach Ted Castaneda respected the decisions of the committee, acknowledging that he would not want to be on the selection committee because of the tough decisions its members face.
"We can just walk away with pride knowing we did everything we could, and we know it was a selection process, and we were happy to be considered," Castaneda said, saying that the team was happy for Claremont.
On the women's, fifth-place Fredonia finished just four points behind fourth-place Plattsburgh at the Atlantic Regional Championship but will be staying home, and Johns Hopkins took fifth place in the Mideast Region - 23 points behind fourth place - but also did not receive an at-large bid.
"I think it was a fair decision," said Bobby Van Allen, Hopkins' women's cross country coach. "Our team was certainly disappointed. I don't think teams would have felt we didn't deserve to get there if we were selected."
The process of sorting through the many deserving teams, along with the responsibility of delivering a season-ending verdict for many, weighed heavily on the selection committee.
"We worked through the process together and came to a conclusion which we all supported and felt comfortable with," said Ned Bishop, the women's cross country coach at Connecticut College and the New England Region representative on the selection committee. "In any team selection process, which most other sports have gone through and have done for years, there are some decisions that are fairly simple to make and others that are more difficult."
The NCAA, with the agreement of the coaches' association, put the new selection process in place to expand the number of teams in the meet from 25 to 32 and to remove what Bishop called "historical data" from the selection process. The old system annually awarded automatic bids to the eight regions based on how teams from those regions performed at the previous season's national meet.
Castaneda noted that he preferred the old system, although he praised the system for using current data for the selection process rather than criteria developed from the previous season.
"It was the NCAA that made the final decision, and since they pay the money, that's what happens," Castaneda said. "It worked out okay. Every system has its flaws."
Bishop said that the removal of historical data was a directive handed down from the NCAA.
"Whether that is an improvement or not is a different question, but this system addresses that directive from the NCAA," Bishop said.
Bishop stressed that it is much too early to assess whether the at-large system is better or worse than previous system. The selection committee will be meeting extensively over the next few days to evaluate this season's selection process, and the results of these talks could be changes to the system.
"I cannot say how this will look a year from now," Bishop said. "It could look exactly the same, or we may have made some adjustments."
Barron would like to see changes to the system, saying that everything "in a system like this" is debatable.
"You're comparing apples to oranges," Barron said. "You have teams that have never raced against each other and have raced on very different courses and very different weather, and you're trying to determine who's better. Sadly, you can't do that."
Barron argued that using conference championship meets in addition to regional meets as postseason criteria hurts teams from better conferences. The Jumbos took eighth at the competitive NESCAC Championship, which has four teams headed to the national meet, while Muhlenberg took second at the Centennial Conference Championship, losing to Haverford, the only other team in their conference headed to Wilmington.
Barron said that the new system forces coaches to have their runners race at their top speed for a full month rather than for a single meet.
"Now they're asking us to kind of change our sport from having a peak to almost asking us to plateau our athletes," Barron said.
Both Castaneda and Van Allen said they will have to adjust their schedules for next season to include more competition outside of their region. It will be harder for Castaneda's Colorado College, though, as the West Region spans from Washington to Arizona. Most ranked teams in Div. III are in the Midwest and the Great Lakes region, making Colorado College geographically "isolated," as Castaneda said.
"The only problem is we never see big teams because we can't go to big meets," Castaneda said.
Johns Hopkins, which usually competes against Div. I competition like Georgetown, will have to find strong Div. III competition. Van Allen mentioned that his team beat Loyola (Md.) - a Div. I team - but the result does not get considered by the NCAA selection committee.
"Now we have to travel further to run against competition that may not be as strong as the competition we see, but may be among teams that NCAA might be looking at," Van Allen said.
Barron said that teams will simply have to adjust to the new system.
"You just have to see the system, read the system and get your team to nationals," Barron said. "It's something that we failed to do this year, and we'll just have to readjust and get our team back there next year."
The coach, while frustrated with the system, has accepted it.
"I personally don't know if this is the right way to do it, but without a better way in mind, it's what we've got," Barron said. "It's flawed, but it's the best we have."
