Update: new pre-selection psych sheets have been posted. Still no response from the NCAA.
The head coach of a team that competed at last weekend’s ECAC meet has told SwimSwam that the decision to remove times from the meet for NCAA qualifying has been overturned. This would mean that the two swimmers eliminated upon the revised release of the psych sheet yesterday are expected to be reinstated.
According to the coach, NCAA championship coordinator Mary Berdo called coaches on Tuesday to inform them that the meet’s times wouldn’t count. The flaw in the interpretation appears to be that Berdo believed that the meet was a “last chance meet,” which it was not approved to be, when everyone else treated it as a conference championship meet, which wouldn’t need separate NCAA approval. Only meets that come after conference championship meets require special approval, as compared to just meeting the normal NCAA guidelines for bona fied competition.
Berdo has not responded to two emails requesting clarification on the matter. No updated psych sheet has been released yet.
The primary impact of the change is that Towson’s Jack Saunderson would be reinstated as the 26th-best time in the 200 butterfly, which will earn him an invite, and Loyola (MD) swimmer Ben Cono is reinstated as the 23rd-best 100 breaststroker, which will also earn him an invite. Barring other changes, that means that Georgia’s Clayton Forde and Texas A&M’s Angel Martinez would return to the alternate list.
Get rid of all last chance meets. Do it in December or at their Conference meet! Simple Fair to everyone!
Actually, the whole Championsip Qualification Meet concept is unnecessary. The rules limit teams to 20 dates of competition which must be used in the 144 day playing season. The rules also specify the parameters for a bona fide competition which must be met for times to count. The rules also specify the final date that times must be accomplished by.
As long as teams schedule meets that meet all of the requirements, there should be no need for special Championship Qualification meets. Just let teams plan their schedules and take their shots where They want.
I don’t understand why as long as times are done within a certain timeframe why they wouldn’t count. It should be as simple as that. I see people in comments below are salty about saunderson’s qualification, but isn’t his qualification just as real as the pac 12 and acc swimmers who qualified in an early time trial because they were worried about holding their taper for the fourth day of their conference meet? Not to knock the swimmers who qualified in those trials, they did the necessary time in the correct timeframe, but what other reason to swim the event just days before the same event in a conference meet.
Its all about the rule. NCAA times are ineligible from a second conference meet. NCAA times are ineligible from a non approved last chance meet. If coaches don’t understand the rules of the NCAA qualification then they should not be allowed to coach. If they understand the rules and are going around the rules to try to get their swimmers in then they are cheating. Most coaches in the NCAA follow the rules and don’t try to cheat. Otherwise there would be more of these bogus regional conference meets.
The rules should be upheld and let the other swimmers in who had legitimate times.
Yeah I’m sure Towson University is trying to take advantage and cheat. Like Braden said, get rid of all last chance meets or get rid of that rule altogether, preferably the former.
Perhaps you could reference the rule that limits a team to one conference meet. I am unaware of it. The ECAC stands for Eastern College Athletic Conference… here is what Wikipedia says about it:
The Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) is a college athletic conference comprising schools that compete in 19 sports (15 men’s and 17 women’s). It has 243 member institutions in NCAA Divisions I, II, and III, ranging in location from Maine to South Carolina and west to Missouri.[1] Most or all members belong to at least one other athletic conference.
The ECAC was founded as the Central Office for Eastern Intercollegiate Athletics in 1938, largely through the efforts of James Lynah of Cornell University. In 1983, the… Read more »
Just an update for everyone – we’ve been in touch with the NCAA, who has explained what happened. There is no rule limiting a team to one conference meet. We’re working with the NCAA right now to make sure we explain it properly to a “t,” but Steve has the right general idea. Towson and Loyola (among others) still had room in their 20 days of competition. So they didn’t need to use their exemption on both of their conference meets.
More to come tomorrow.
Pg. 14 of the 2017 Division 1 Swimming & Diving Pre-Championships manual:
A student-athlete is permitted to qualify in only one Championships Qualification Meet. If a student-athlete participates in more than one Championships Qualification Meet, results for that student-athlete from the second meet will not be eligible for championships qualification.
NCAA RULE – “Championships Qualification Meet” is the NCAA’s phrasing for “last chance meets.”
You can see them use that on the list of last chance meets here, for example: http://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/2017DIMWSD_ApprovedChampionshipQualificationMeets_20161130.pdf
Woohoo!! Some Maryland teams just got themselves into the meet.
At the end of the day, this is about the kids – Great fix!
Such a shame the reinstated swimmers and coaches had to go through this aggravation. I am glad that fairness prevailed and NCAA did the right thing. Go Cono! Go Sauderson!
Absolutely agree that the right decision was reached. But I do feel a bit bad for the two kids who thought that they were in for the last 12-24 hours, after the initial ruling. I understand that the psych sheets are preliminary and that changes happen, but it’s still a raw deal to hear that you’re in and then you’re out.
I hope the outcry from Braden’s articles may have had a little to do with the reversal. At least it wasn’t fake news.
Considering that there were students who also thought they were in 24 hours prior, only to wake up to being told their last effort at a standardized meet were nullified, I don’t feel too bad. The former losing their spots would have been a greater injustice imo.
So it wasn’t a designated last chance meet but Towson and Loyola get to have two conference championships? Can of worms officially opened
My personal opinion is that last chance meets are a can of worms in-and-of themselves, but that’s another discussion for another time.
100% agree even when we have benefited from them
Why are they a problem? Assuming appropriate standards, officiating, timing, etc….
Seems they are an advantage to in particular the SEC swimmers as if they are sick, have a bad swim, or mess up taper than can try again almost 3 weeks later. PAC 12 swimmers champs are last weekend so no “retry”. Of course the SEC swimmers don’t know what they will ultimately need to get in, versus PAC 12 where they have a pretty good idea (if knowing what you time you need helps you).
Not sure if students/families have to pay for attending these last chance meets, or the colleges cover them, that could impact less well off swimmers.
I sure wish there was a way to edit comments for stupid typos, even if only for a few minutes after post.
Towson competed in the CAA championships the week before. That would make the ECAC meet after their conference championship and subject to the Last Chance rule, no? Or do teams get 2 conference championship meets? Maybe Florida and Indiana should just enter the Pac 12 meet as a back up next year.
1anda2 – this seems to be the confusion. But, as coach Schaffer said, this is not a new scenario, and we’re hoping to learn why this happened this year. We’ve heard from a few coaches some opinions on why it happened, but we’re hoping to get some explanation direct from the Ms. Berdo and the NCAA instead.
Would be interesting to see if anyone has qualified from this meet in the recent past. So has this come up and not been challenged or it just hasn’t been an issue.
That’s actually a great question. I did a real quick scan (it wasn’t thorough enough to make it definitive) of last year’s meet, didn’t look like any qualifying times out of there.
HOWEVER – they allowed those times onto the official pre-selection list last year, they’ve perhaps de facto implied that those times are allowable (UMBC freshman Andrew Gliese is an example, though he ultimately was too low to be invited).
Eryn Eddy from UVA went 48.58 in the 100 free at ECACs to qualify for NCAAs. This was after competing at the ACC championships earlier that year.
I know Lovro Bilonic qualified for St Peters at ECACs a few years ago, not sure if any others.
Geez, there is a lot of cumulative swimming knowledge on this site. I guess we all should get a life, but passions are passions.
Francesca Stoppa from Rutgers qualified in the 200 butterfly last year at ECACs after having failed to qualify at Big 10s.
I’m not sure if this is why but just speculation. The CAA meet and many other conference meets don’t allow for teams to bring their nonscoring swimmers to swim at the same championship like what was allowed at PAC12 resulting in zdroiks qualifying in the 100 fly. So this meet is for many teams non conference or non scoring swimmers to swim. I don’t know if that has to do with it or not
Would make sense for swimmers in that situation, but in this case at least one of the qualifying swimmers in question (Saunderson) did compete at the CAA meet as a scoring swimmer.
Cono swam at his conference meet too.
One has to wonder how this all came about. Neither the ECAC meet nor Ms. Berdo are new to the NCAA landscape. The ECAC meet is held on the same weekend as other conference meets. If there needed to be any clarification as to whether the ECAC meet needed to be defined as a last chance meet after a long history of not being treated as such, that should have been dealt with proactively by the Swimming & Diving Committee, NOT after the meet was held. Glad reason finally won out!
I think that generally, guys don’t qualify for NCAAs at ECACs.
The teams that go are generally in three colors – teams that sometimes have a guy or two on the bubble but usually go all-in at their smaller conference meets a few weeks before (Towson, Loyola, Rider, etc), teams that don’t ever have people qualify for the big meet (Binghampton, VMI, Maine, etc), and teams that are good (UVa, Navy, Penn, etc) but send their non-conference teams there.
So I guess it was probably a bit of a different situation than usual. But yeah, it’s good that reason won out.
FYI, Binghamton sent David Holmes to the NCAA in 2007 with a 1:35.5 in the 200 Free. Just saying. There are diamonds in every rough.
Hmmm, thanks for the history lesson. I missed that.
Navy men qualified the 400 Medley Relay in 2014