05/17/17 – State Track & Field Roll-up

May 17, 2017 Track and Field Blog Updates

As an experiment for 2017, the KHSAA asked coaches to notify the Association when they desired to scratch an athlete from an event during the State Meet. This originally came as a request from the members of the Commissioner’s Track and Field/Cross Country Advisory committee to lessen the number of empty lanes at the State Meet. The process is under review and will be evaluated to determine its feasibility for the future. Below describes the procedure for implementing this request for 2017. This procedure was implemented today (Wednesday) based on scratches received by midnight on Tuesday.

The size and scope of the State Meet mean that the procedure has to be narrowly focused and able to be implemented in a streamlined fashion, especially given the myriad of tasks being accomplished this week in preparation.

Below describes the procedure for implementing this request for 2017. 

• If a state qualifier was scratched from an event, the coach of the next at-large qualifier was notified that they would have the opportunity to step up into that vacant spot. If that entrant was not available, the spot will remain vacant.
• If for some reason, review of the next at-large qualifier resulted in a tie, there was a preferred order to breaking the tie.
• First, the region that the original student-athlete was scratched from had first priority.
• If neither tied athlete was from the region that scratched, regions were reviewed in a random order using a “random roll-up table” (In this case, Region 7, followed by 4, followed by 1, followed by 5, followed by 2, followed by 3, followed by 6) to establish priority. This type of random roll-up has been successfully used for many years with wrestling bracket openings. Once a random rollup has been used, the next random roll-up would involve the next region in the order listed.
• For example, if a 1600m runner scratched from Region 4 in A, and the next at-large qualifier resulted in a tie of two or more athletes, if either of those athletes were from Region 4, they would receive the vacant spot. If none of those athletes were from Region 4, we then moved to a random roll-up table. 

This procedure is will be reviewed after the 2017 State Meet to determine if it will be used in the future, and if so, what changes need to be made. Thanks to all of the coaches who sent in the scratches and good luck at the state meet! 

– KHSAA –

The KHSAA staff routinely publishes blog posts to better communicate with its various constituencies and the public. For a list of those blogs, go to http://khsaa.org/news-stats-pubs/sports-blogs/