Introduction

The progression of qualification standards for the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships has been a topic of hot discussion in the track and field community for years now. Qualification for NCAA Indoors is based off of the top 16 performances in the nation in any given season leading up to the championships. This only applies to individual events, as the 4x400-meter and distance medley relays accept the top 12 teams.

Data

The data for this study encompasses both the top qualifying mark and the minimum/16th qualifying mark for every individual event for every NCAA indoor season since 2016. Track events longer than 400 meters were converted to seconds. The “w” or “m” preceding an event title indicates whether it’s the women’s or men’s event. Data was taken from the Track and Field Results Reporting System (TFRRS).

Percent Change In All Events

Because data points inside the set range from below 2 in the women’s high jump to in excess of 6000 in the men’s heptathlon, the only measure for change that would be fair across all events is percent change.

One consideration for this data is that field events and track events have opposite goals. On the track, getting “better” is getting faster and decreasing your time. In field events, getting “getting” is increasing your marks. In track events, the goal for this data is to have a negative percent change, while field events would aim for a positive percent change.

To make this more digestible, I took the absolute value of the percent change for all the track events, so that a positive value signifies an improvement, no matter the event.

Four of the five events with the highest mean year-over-year change are field events. The only event that has a negative mean year-over-year change, meaning, on average, the minimum qualifying standard worsened each year, is the men’s triple jump.

Biggest Growers

To get a better idea of what exactly went into the events with the highest mean year-over-year improvements, I chose to isolate and display the events with the five highest rates of improvement. Those five events were, in order: men’s weight throw, women’s shot put, women’s 3000 meters, women’s pole vault, and women’s weight throw.

Unlike the previous chart, this does not show the absolute value of percent change in the women’s 3000m. Because it is a track event, a negative percent change means the quality of the event is improving. All improvements across all charts are in blue, all regressions are in red.

The men’s weight throw and women’s 3000 meters have shown the most consistent year-over-year growth throughout the last decade, with the men’s weight standard increasing in 8 out of 9 years and the women’s 3000 standard getting faster in 8 out of 9 years as well. Both the women’s shot put and pole vault were the most inconsistent with the standard increasing only 5 out of 9 years.

Top Marks

Are the increases seen across events indicative of increases in the top-end performances too, or simply progression in the depth of these fields? To assess this, I conducted the same analysis for the top qualifying marks each year as I did for the minimum qualifying marks, tracking the mean year-over-year change.

When analyzing how the top qualifiers have shifted, only one track event (men’s 60m) has, on average, gotten worse year-over-year. Four field events hold that distinction: both men’s and women’s triple jump, women’s pentathlon, and men’s shot put. Of the five events that ranked at the top when analyzing the minimum qualifiers, four still rank inside the top eight, with women’s shot put coming in the lowest with the 14th-highest mean year-over-year change.

Overall, the progression of the top marks is not too dissimilar from the progression of the minimum qualifying marks, but the greater number of events that worsened make the chart look slightly different.

Additional Story Ideas

  • Why were the biggest changes seen in field events as opposed to track events?

  • Is there a specific distance group among the track events (short sprints, long sprints, mid-distance, long distance) that saw greater change compared to other groups?

  • What factors went in to men’s triple jump being the only event to see the standard consistently worsen?