LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL FOR CHANGE IN NSAA RULES AND REGULATIONS
Title:		Cross Country: Class A District Qualifying Procedure
Author:		Seth McClain
School:		Fremont
NSAA District:		2

Proposal for:		Activities Manual

Classes Affected:		Class A
Activities Affected:		Boys Cross-Country Girls Cross-Country
This proposal:		WILL NOT increase costs to the school WILL NOT increase costs to the NSAA WILL NOT increase travel for participating schools WILL NOT decrease a student's or coach's instruction time
Implementation date:		2026-09-30
Sections affected in Activities Manual:		Page 8-9	Article District Seeding Process Class A	Section
Summary:		From 2015 to 2024, Class A used a serpentine system that averaged each team's top 2 meets. In 2025 it was switched to averaging each team's top 4 meets prior to conference competition. We are proposing to return the district serpentine procedure to using each team's top 2 meets.
Rationale:		When compiling the stats on the ranked teams vs. the State qualifying teams from 2015 until now, some very interesting things come up: -upsets do happen, but rarely. Nearly every ranked team qualifies for State each year in Class A. -the belief that it is inequitable to have a "girls" year and a "boys" year is false. Teams have actually fared minimally better on the opposing gender's year, with success of the different genders on different years ranging from 93-98%, with 94.4% being the overall success percentage of girls and boys ranked teams qualifying for state over the 10 year period. -only 1 year (2015) had two ranked teams fail to qualify, and they were 8th and 9th ranked. -never has a top 7 ranked team not qualified for State since 2015. The stats do show that whether we use 2 meets or 4 meets is irrelevant. On average, less than 1 ranked team (8th, 9th or 10th) hasn't qualified per state per year. Last year, when we went to 4 meets, the #8 ranked girls team did not qualify. Even if they would have, the previous system had 100% success nine different times, and was changed for no statistically relevant reason. Simply put, upsets will happen, and the previous system showed that while they rarely did, it was an 8-10th ranked team that was beaten by a top unranked team a small handful of times.
Pros:		Returning to the previous system shows that ranked teams qualified 94.4% of the time over the 10 years it was utilized. There is no statistical reason to support increasing the number of meets used to compute the average time. Using 2 meets had proven to be nearly flawless and saved the coaches time on data entry that they could spend doing something else. By requiring just two meets, no team had to be concerned about meet cancellations, athletes unable to compete for various reasons, or simply having to force your team to do additional meets if it wasn't what was best for the athletes.
Cons:		There are no cons to using 2 meets instead of 4. There was a belief that teams would choose "fast courses" and skew the success ratio. The 10 years worth of stats have shown that to be false, as it has been very rare for a ranked team to not qualify for state...and never has it been a top 7 team. Interestingly, when looking back through the years, the UNK invite continued to come up on many teams' "top 2 best times" even when they had also supposedly run on a "fast course" early in the year.