Conferences

Conference Championships are the first part of the College Postseason!

After the regular season finishes, teams can sign up to participate in the postseason, starting with their Conference Championship tournament. Top finishers at these tournaments qualify for their respective Regional Championships, and the top finishers at Regionals qualify for College Nationals!

Each conference is awarded bids to Regionals based on the end of season strength rankings that USA Ultimate runs each week beginning in March. The more highly ranked teams your conference has, the more top finishers will advance to Regionals. Note that there is no minimum game requirement to participate in the postseason! While teams must play 10 or more sanctioned games to be ranked and have an impact on bid allocations, any team may play the postseason and qualify for tournaments.

Unfortunately, I do not. In the club world, there are Sections and Sectional Championships (like on Glee). In the college world, there are Conferences and Conference Championships! Nobody really understands why the nomenclature is different, so we all just kind of go with it. It's functionally the same thing. USAU is weird like that.

The RD team builds out seeding based on specific criteria handed to us from USAU. They are as follows:

1. The official USAU rankings - this is our primary indicator of where to seed your team, provided you've played at least 10 sanctioned games and have been ranked.

2. Individual game results - we can use this to adjust where teams are seeded, especially for unranked teams. If an unranked team has three wins over the top team in a given conference and no losses to anyone in the conference, they'll likely get the top seed. If a ranked team is one spot ahead of another but has only losses to them, we're allowed to switch them.

3. Team input from coaches and captains - we can take this into account, but cannot promise we'll make adjustments based on it. We value the "eye test" from teams to a degree but can only make so many tweaks.

Conferences seeding is subjective to a degree. We'll absolutely hear questions and input about seeding, but sometimes there's not much we can do based on the criteria.

Look I'm going to level with you. Earning a bid for your conference is not the same as earning a bid for your team. In fact, there's no such thing as earning a bid for your team. If you want to qualify for Regionals, win your games at Conferences. It's as simple as that. That third strength bid that your earned for the conference during the regular season doesn't belong to your team. It belongs to whomever finishes in third place at the tournament. Everyone gets to play for it, no matter if they played the regular season or not. No, the RDs cannot change the number of bids because a talented new team suddenly appears in the postseason. Neither can the national directors. This is not new, this is not unheard of, and it's not stealing, though it's often referred to in that way.

Win your games.

The Metro East has 3 Men's Conferences, 2 Women's Conferences, and a Developmental Conference. You can figure out which conference your team falls into by checking on the conferences page for your division! The geographic breakdown is slightly different across gender divisions, but the overview is below. Note that we only have one developmental men's conference, which spans the entire region.

Women's (D-I and D-III):

• Eastern Metro East - All of CT and NJ, NY counties east of Delaware, Ostego Herkimer and St Lawrence Counties

• Western NY - NY counties west of (and including) Delaware, Ostego Herkimer and St Lawrence Counties, Eastern Ontario in Canada

Men's (D-I and D-III):

• Hudson Valley - All of CT, NY counties east of Delaware, Ostego Herkimer and St Lawrence Counties and north of Westchester County and Putnam County

• Metro NY - All of NJ, NY counties south of (and including) Westchester County and Putnam County

• Western NY - NY Counties west of (and including) Delaware, Ostego Herkimer and St Lawrence Counties, Eastern Ontario in Canada

Details are coming in February! Feel free to bid to host these events!

If you have further questions after reading the descriptions, please reach out to your DRD or RD. More info will be posted and sent around soon!

Details are coming in February! Feel free to bid to host these events.