National Qualifying Series this year

[iceskating21]

Is there big change of National Qualifying Series this year? When my skater went to it in previous years, they went to regional on a specific day and top 4 were qualified for sectional. This year, she didn't go, while some of her friends went to. We heard that they can pick 2 qualifying competitions to compete and pick the higher score. Because there is no that "big day" any more, our club even had no "send off" which used to be a big event for the club. It's a bit disappointing. I'm wondering, are there other rules changed too? What the criteria is to go up now? Are still the top 4 in regional qualified for sectional? And top 4 of sectional to national? Why did they make this change? Is this system better?

 

[gkelly]

Is there big change of National Qualifying Series this year? When my skater went to it in previous years, they went to regional on a specific day and top 4 were qualified for sectional. This year, she didn't go, while some of her friends went to. We heard that they can pick 2 qualifying competitions to compete and pick the higher score. Because there is no that "big day" any more, our club even had no "send off" which used to be a big event for the club. It's a bit disappointing. I'm wondering, are there other rules changed too? What the criteria is to go up now? Are still the top 4 in regional qualified for sectional? And top 4 of sectional to national? Why did they make this change? Is this system better?

Yes, there was a big change.

See https://www.usfigureskating.org/2023-national-qualifying-series-competition-central and https://m.usfigureskating.org/series/registration/overview/11?id=11 (requires log in)

There are no more Regional competitions. The first level of qualifying this year took place during the summer at designated NQS competitions.

The skaters in each region with the top scores at those competitions qualified for Sectionals, which will be taking place this week.


As I understand:
The NQS was added for the 2019-20 season to give skaters additional opportunities to qualify for Sectionals, so their chances of advancing wouldn't all come down to one competition.

In 2020-21, it was not possible to hold in-person qualifying competitions at all. At first there was a plan to have 8 competitions in the fall that skaters could choose 2 of, to allow for more flexibility during the pandemic when almost no summer competitions had been held and many skaters were home with their families rather than at their previous training locations. But even that became impossible because of high Covid-19 infection rates, so the process of qualifying for nationals or for the development camp at the lower levels was all virtual.

In 2021-22, the 8 fall competitions with the opportunity to choose 2 and best score used for qualifying was introduced again, and last year the live competitions did actually come off.

My understanding is that USFS then polled coaches and skaters and officials to see what they liked and didn't like about last year's approach and then tried to combine the best of both approaches. In general, skaters liked the opportunity to compete anywhere in the country and to compete more than once to earn qualifying scores, but they missed having an opportunity for all the top scorers to get together in one place to compete head-to-head to earn trips to Nationals or to the development camp.

So this year's approach is to eliminate Regionals and to use designated summer competitions to qualify for Sectionals, and then to have an actual Sectional competition for singles skaters. (Pairs and dance are a bit different since there are so few teams compared to singles.)

(I also believe that part of the reason for using summer competitions instead of regionals in the fall was that it was hard to find clubs willing to host a huge qualifying competition in October, when ice time was often hard to get with hockey season also in full swing, whereas the summer NQS events were held as part of competitions that clubs had already been hosting on a yearly basis during a time of year when ice time is easier to come by and skaters are less focused on school.)

This is only the first year of the current format, so it's too soon to say whether it's better or worse. No doubt some skaters will like it better and others will prefer the way things were before the introduction of the NQS and the disruption of the pandemic.