As reported on row2k two weeks ago, on September 16 the NCAA Championships sports management cabinet, which governs the operations of all NCAA championships, voted to make the following changes to the D1 NCAA Rowing Championship format:

l. Women's Rowing Committee.

(1) Automatic qualification. The cabinet agreed to permit the Women's Rowing Committee to grant automatic qualification into the championship beginning with the 2011 championship. The cabinet directed the Women's Rowing Committee to provide a plan for providing automatic qualification when eligible conferences exceed 50 percent of the bracket.

(2) Individual awards. The cabinet approved a recommendation from the Women's Rowing Committee that no individual awards be given at the championship. It was noted that this change will result in a savings of approximately $3500.

3) The cabinet approved a recommendation that the selection criteria of "results versus regionally ranked teams" be changed to two separate criteria which would be "results versus ranked teams in other regions" and "results versus regionally ranked teams in own region."

row2k will try to address the history, mechanisms and implications of the change below.

Where Women's NCAA Rowing is Now, How We Got Here
For those who prefer not to get mired down in the details, here is a short version:
- To expand participation at the Championship, effective with the 2009 championship rowing changed from an "Individual Team Sport" to a "Team Sport," which had the effect of allowing 16 complete teams to be invited, rather than a lesser number of teams and a few at-large Varsity eights. The overall increased numbers at the championship were concentrated in the greater participation in the Second Varsity and Varsity Four events.

- With the change, immediately rowing became the only NCAA Team Sport that did not use an Automatic Qualifier system. To eliminate this discrepancy, the AQ system was voted in last week, and will be adopted with the 2011 championship. This will replace the current Regional invitational approach, granting seven AQ spots with the 2011 championship, and eight spots with the 2012 championship. The remaining spots will be granted on an at-large basis according to results.

- Additionally, rowing also became the only NCAA Team Sport that gave out trophies for winners of individual events within the championship. Thus, the elimination of trophies in the Varsity Eight, Second Varsity Eight, and Varsity Four was voted in last week, and will be adopted with the 2011 championship. An easy way to understand this change: rowing is now more like football, soccer, or water polo, where the "winner of the game" is the NCAA champion; and no longer like track and field, swimming, or even tennis, where an individual can be an NCAA champion in their specific event without winning the overall team championship, and a team can win the team championship for overall performance even if they do not win any specific events.

And a bit longer version:
In hopes of expanding participation in the sport, the Cabinet decided in 2007 that, starting with the 2009 regatta, rowing would be reclassified of rowing from an "individual team sport" to a "team sport." The primary effect of this change was to allow 16 full team invitations, as opposed to the "12 teams and four at-large varsity eights" and "14 teams and two at-large varsity eights" that had been previously invited.

Alternate approaches to expansion were proposed along the way, such as increasing the number of Varsity 8 invitees to 18, or shifting the Varsity Four to a Third Varsity Eight, In those cases, expansion would take the form of adding more Varsity Eights (and therefore more programs overall), or simply increasing the number of athletes among the team invites, usually with a mind to preserving the "Individual Team Sport" status and preserving at-large Varsity Eight invitations.

In the end, it was decided that expansion would take the form of the adoption of the "Team Sport" designation, which would allow 16 complete teams to be invited.

This reclassification immediately made women's rowing an outlier among NCAA team championships, in that every other strictly Team championship uses an AQ system. As such, after considerable debate and disagreement among the ranks of coaches and administrators over the past several months, the move to an AQ system probably was inevitable from the moment the Team Championship classification was adopted.

Just as inevitable, but considerably less expected (and far less popular), is the resultant elimination of trophies for the three crew events contested during the championships. In presenting trophies for individual events within a Team Sport championship, again rowing was an outlier among NCAA Team sports; no other Team Sport awards both Team and Individual trophies. As noted a couple weeks back, this was almost entirely unexpected fallout of the move to the Team Championship.

Back when the D1 Rowing Committee recommended AQs, departing committee chair Tom Bold said "placement still matters, but individual boats will be earning points only toward the team championship.

"We felt that recognizing individual performances was sending a mixed message with the team aspect," said Bold. "This was definitely a committee decision, but we also felt that it was something that may have been mandated down the road from the standpoint that no other team sport awards individual medals."

The road to the present situation, as well as the road forward, was not and may not be entirely smooth. Many coaches and involved parties found themselves considerably conflicted as the implications of each new rule change became understood. For example, a coach of a large program with 20 full scholarships was understandably in favor of the team championship concept in that it both paralleled their team structure and emphasis, and also encouraged expansion both of the championships and hopefully of the sport. However, as a member of a deep and competitive conference, when the issue of automatic qualifiers was introduced the same coach was opposed to the idea, as it would become much harder to reach the championship as bids were parceled out to other AQ conferences.

The non-bureaucratic, "sentimental" argument against the AQ approach has mostly been rooted in the idea that, under the prevailing entirely at-large invitation system, it was almost guaranteed that the top 16 teams in the country were invited to the championship. Under an automatic qualifier system, this was no longer a guarantee.

The Conference Breakdown
To qualify for an Automatic Qualifier spot, a conference must have at least six members that have competed together for championship for a minimum of two years. Some conferences are closed conferences, such as the Big 10; other conferences allow associate members that can boost the number of programs in a specific sport, such as the Colonial Athletic Association

At present, the following conferences qualify for a single AQ invitation per conference:

Atlantic Coast Conference: Boston College, Clemson, Duke, Miami, North Carolina, Virginia

Atlantic 10: Dayton, Duquesne, Fordham, George Washington, La Salle, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Saint Joseph's and Temple

Big East: Connecticut, Georgetown, Louisville, Notre Dame, Rutgers, Syracuse, Villanova, West Virginia

Big 10: Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Ohio State, Wisconsin

Ivy League: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Yale

Pac 10: California, Oregon State, Stanford, UCLA, USC, Washington, Washington State

Colonial Athletic Association in 2011: The required two years after adding Buffalo as an associate member in 2009, in 2011 the Colonial Athletic Association will also be eligible: Buffalo, Delaware, Drexel, George Mason, Northeastern, Old Dominion

Metro-Atlantic Athletic Conference in 2012: With the addition of Drake as an associate member starting with the 2009-2010 season, in 2012 the Metro-Atlantic Athletic Conference will become eligible: Drake, Fairfield, Iona, Loyola, Manhattan, Marist.

Looking ahead, the Patriot League and the West Coast Conference are the most likely near-term additions, as both have five members at present.

As reported previously, not more than 50% of all bids to the championship can be granted by automatic qualifier; with two more conferences are slated to join this group in the next two years, rowing will max out their AQ spots in 2012, at eight of the 16 invitations. In the event that a ninth conference supports six women's rowing squads, there is a two-year waiting period before the conference would be granted an AQ, and subsequently the Cabinet would return to the issue.

The AQ Debate
Rowing committee chairman and MAAC conference chief Marshall Foley presents the debate in terms of access to the championship for all schools that sponsor rowing, rather than just the top schools.

"The argument for the AQ inclusion access to the championship - and that's the key term that I've been using and I think a lot of us have been using it, access to the championship - is that every school in the country that sponsors women rowing, either now or eventually, through conference affiliation can have access to the championship with the AQ process."

Foley is aware of the arguments against AQs, particularly that the AQ system will likely create a championship that includes less competitive crews than does the current system, at least in the near term. "The term that a lot of the folks use against the AQ argument is that, as they call it, the Championship is being watered down, watered down, you know, to a less competitive championship.

"I certainly have a bias for it - I'm on the committee that recommended it and also representative of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference which will certainly benefit from AQs," Foley granted. "I think the argument is that if you look at other team sport championships, in all of them, the NCAA has gone the route of automatic qualifiers knowing that that no other team championship field is the x number of best teams in the country; there's certainly a mix. It is important to note also that the NCAA by-laws says that in no point can AQs make up more than 50 percent of the championship. Certainly by going to AQ you are guaranteed to have the eight best teams there for sure, and it is really going to be more than that, because you figure that whoever gets that AQ from the Ivy League, the Pac 10, Big 10, from the ACC for example, they're certainly going to be among the best teams in the country anyway. So even if you take those four conferences plus the 8 at large, you're still guaranteed that you have the best 12 teams there."

One major difference between most NCAA Team Sports is that none are "racing" sports, where upsets are a genuine rarity - in all cases of NCAA racing sports, the classification "Individual Team Sport" prevails. In ball sports, David upsets Goliath often enough, usually due to differences in style of play that confounds the supposedly "better" competitor. In racing sports, it is extremely rare to see this happen, as speed from point A to point B is not nearly as vulnerable to factors such as style of play.

Another possible complication here is the possibility that the nation's fastest Varsity eight could well fail to earn an invitation to the NCAA Championship if their lower boats are not up to snuff. Under the new format, which does not recognize the winner of the Varsity Eight as a national champion, this may be a moot point. Which brings us to…

The Awards Debate
Unlike the AQ debate, which has been ongoing for some time, With respect to the elimination of awards by event, the issue was introduced only this past summer, and is clearly the more extraordinary development given the history and standard practices of collegiate rowing over the past century and a half. In bringing the sport into line with other NCAA Team sports, ironically the elimination of awards by event establishes the NCAA championship as almost a sole outlier in all the sport of rowing.

"Since that proposal has gone out there this summer and up until this meeting, I have been spending a lot of time on the phone with coaches and administrators," Foley said, "and I think the coaching community certainly has let it be known while there may be some division on the AQ's, maybe of between the have's and have not's as far as the championships concerned, I think that the coaches have probably not unanimously, but certainly the overwhelming majority, are against the revision of the awarding of the medals. And there is no question about that."

Foley defends the decision in terms of the broader benefits the NCAA has brought to women's rowing.

"In some ways I think this award question is a microcosm of what I think a lot of the folk in the rowing community may have been against with the NCAA championship, in that how it's being molded more a team championship," he said. "I can say that I understand that; certainly there are a lot of people out there invested in women's collegiate rowing, and it's not to discount the knowledge and experiences they have had there, but I think that under the NCAA umbrella there has been a lot of positives that have come for women's collegiate rowing, women's rowing in general, and certainly with the championship event. I think those positives sometimes get overlooked in the rush to point out some of the negatives that are perceived to come out of this.

"When I talk with a lot of coaches, I say, you know, I understand that I know you may not be happy with everything that goes on with NCAA Championship," Foley continued. "But at the same time is the sport better off for being under the NCAA Championships, if you look back to where the championship was 15 years ago, then I think the answer to that is an unequivocal yes."

Is there any way back from this decision at present?

"You can never say never," Foley said; "there is certainly an always opportunity for anything to happen. If you would have talked five years ago, if anyone would have ever thought it would have come around to AQs, I think that no one would have thought that change would have ever been made. All the championships, both for rowing and the rest of NCAA, everything is very fluid. You don't want them to be static, and you're always trying to make them better. So I think that, it will be interesting to see how this works out, I don't think it's a done deal forever certainly, but is it going to change back right away - it's probably not going to do that either. You're always very wary about making knee jerk reactions if there is something that changes and the initial reaction is all negative. You don't necessarily want to flip-flop back, sometimes you to ride it out a little bit and see what happens."

New Conference Alignments; Next Steps
Some conferences and programs that do not currently qualify for AQ invitations may look to expand by way of associate memberships. "You're certainly going to see programs out there that are going to seek to put their program in a position where they can get to the championship through access to an AQ," Foley said. Once the number of sponsoring conferences goes beyond eight, a new selection format will have to be created.

Foley noted that women's lacrosse is in this predicament, and uses both an RPI system (essentially a measure of strength-of-schedule) and play-in games. "Obviously we don't have an RPI in rowing, so that is one tool that is not available to us," Foley noted. "And then obviously having a play in or row-in that takes a little bit more of little more of a scheduling impact like rowing than it would with women's lacrosse."

"Although it could happen in 2012, my guess is that no sooner than 2013 will we be at nine conferences, so it gives us three years to work on this," Foley said. "It is plenty of time to get it done, but at the same time, I don't think we should wait around to the last minute. This is a conversation that needs to start immediately, and I think that it needs to happen through an open forum where we can seek input from coaches through the CRCA, where we can talk with folks obviously the NCAA championship staff, and (decide) how to handle the championship field format when we get to nine or more automatic qualifiers."

"Throughout I fully realized there are those who don't agree with my opinion or the committee's opinion to move this way, and you know they are certainly entitled to that opinion," Foley said. "And I certainly in no way want to quash the discussion on it and even the going forward with the awards or how we're going to handle the more than eight conferences with AQs. I think it's important to have those discussions, I think it's important for everyone to voice their opinion."

"My hope is that now that the decision is made, then hopefully we can stop debating that point (AQs) and we can move on to the points where we can have an impact now," Foley concluded. "I'd like to see people have some real dialogue on some things moving forward as far as how we can handle more than 9 conferences, and if there still discussion to be had on the award issue, we can have that kind of thing now. Although the AQ issue which as you said has been somewhat divisive through the community, hopefully we can move past that now and talk about some other things for a while."