When it comes to tomorrow's Open New England Championships at Franklin Park in Boston, chances are this time, they'll count.
Due to a change in NCAA rules, performance in this weekend's races may have an impact on the selection of teams that will receive at-large bids to Nationals come November.
Whereas in previous years the outcomes of only the two races preceding Regionals were taken into account, this year the process was expanded to include an additional race.
"They went with an initial list of things to determine that bid, and they're just tweaking it a little," women's coach Kristen Morwick said. "They probably have found that they need more information. There are probably things that were deemed not so important and things that would be more valuable to making that decision. I think it's always going to be tweaked a little every year based on how they found selections to work out in the past."
"They're just kind of fine-tuning it," men's coach Ethan Barron added. "Any time anything political like the NCAA makes a change, it's going to take some time to work out the kinks. They're still trying to find the best way to make an at-large bid system fit a sport like cross country, which is going to be very difficult."
Depending on whether or not the coaches choose to race their top seven at ECAC Championships on Nov. 8, thereby having that race count towards selection (and traditionally they have not) for the first time, the Open New England Championships could hold relevance.
The rule change lets the committee make decisions based on the last three races in which a team competed with its top seven runners. With ECACs falling later on the schedule, they would knock the Open New Englands out of consideration in the event that Tufts comes out with its top lineup.
But the potential inclusion of tomorrow's race may end up proving less important than the NCAA hoped, as the cross country season is still relatively young.
"This is my seventh year, and I think five out of the six we've been there, the varsity at Open New Englands has not been the same athletes as at the regional championship," Barron said. "It's not like we're picking our varsity seven right now. We may be putting seven on the line that are running the best races at this point in the season, but there's still a lot left in the season for people to step up and earn a varsity spot."
"We didn't even race [then-senior tri-captain and All-American] Cat Beck [(LA '08)] until this meet last year," Morwick added. "If you look at how good we were now to a month later, it was a markedly different team."
Despite the alteration, the central focus in the selection process will still be a team's finish at regional championships, with a secondary emphasis on performance at conference championships. The inclusion of additional races accommodates teams that run outside of an athletic conference.
"The main part of the system didn't change, which is how you finish at regional championships," Barron said. "Ideally, the NCAA would like to see basically the criteria being the regional championships and the conference championships, so for us that would be the NESCAC, but there are programs like Nebraska Wesleyan that don't have a NESCAC. They've had to make up a whole laundry list of rules to fit [the situation]."
And with the depth of a powerhouse conference like the NESCAC, where it can prove unnecessary to look beyond the conference championship, the change in rules most likely will not end up playing a big role in the Jumbos' seasons.
"It's probably more valid for the Southern teams or the teams out West that usually don't even get an at-large bid," Morwick said. "In some cases, it doesn't apply to the NESCAC schools. Our conference is so strong and has done so well nationally, I think if we do well in our conference meet and finish in the top five teams in the regional qualifier, we have a really good chance to go. It's not a huge difference from last year."
The selection process for teams receiving at-large bids underwent a major overhaul for the 2006 season. Whereas the strength of a region the previous year was formerly used to determine the number of bids it would receive, the system was reformed to more accurately reflect the depth of each region at the time of selection.
"It used to be based on historical data," Barron said. "For instance, how many teams qualified for Nationals from New England this year would basically be the number of teams in the fop fifteen at Nationals last year plus one. NCAA decided that it isn't fair to determine what a region gets based on how it performed the year before."
Whether the revision actually provides an improvement in the selection process, however, remains to be seen.
"[With the new system, you] can't use past results to determine present competitiveness, and that makes complete sense," Barron said. "I wholeheartedly support that. Whether or not we switched to a system that works or whether we switched from a broken system to another broken system, only time is going to tell."
