Regionals

Regional Championships are the next step of the College Postseason!

After Conference Championships, the the top finishers will qualify for the Metro East Regional Championships! These tournaments are typically two weeks after Conferences, and the top finishers at Regionals qualify for College Nationals! We often have observers at the Regional Championships tournaments, especially for the finals and/or other games-to-go to College Nationals.

Each region is awarded bids to Nationals based on the end of season strength rankings that USA Ultimate runs each week beginning in March. The more highly ranked teams the Metro East has, the more top finishers will advance to College Nationals. 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.

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

1. The official USAU rankings - the final regular season rankings from USAU dictate the order of how the conference finishers are seeded into regionals. We know this one is hard to understand sometimes.

1. 1. 1. What this actually means is that the seeds are decided and delegated before conferences begin, and are set based on the strength of teams in each Conference.

      2. If the top five teams are all from Western NY, for example, then seeds 1-5 go to WNY finishers 1 thru 5.

      3. If the top five, however, are from Metro NY, Western NY, Metro NY, Hudson Valley, and Western NY in that order, the seeds 1-5 are assigned to conference finishers in that order - 1 is the winner of Metro NY, 2 is the winner of Western NY, 3 is the 2nd place from Metro NY, and so forth.

      4. This means that if the top ranked team from Metro NY doesn't place first, the first seed at regionals will go to whomever beat them in the finals, not the number two ranked team in the region. The logic is that if you beat number 1, you become number 1.

2. Your team's finish at conferences. You place into the predetermined seedings (as described above) based on these results. No team who beats another team at conferences can be seeded behind them at regionals. 

3. Individual game results - we can sometimes make small adjustments based on in season results, but this is really only for unranked teams, and only in certain cases.

4. Team input from coaches and captains - we can take this into account at times, but cannot promise we'll make adjustments based on it, especially since seedings are approved by the National Directors in each division.

While we can field input and questions about seeding, it is largely out of our hands. Regionals seeding is designed to be less subjective than conferences seeding.

Look I'm going to level with you. Earning a bid for the region 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 Nationals, win your games at Regionals. It's as simple as that. That second bid the Metro East sometimes earns is not your team's. It belongs to whomever finishes in second 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.

Glad you asked! Summary is below. Head on over to our regionals pages to check it out in further detail.

Division-I Women's and Men's Regionals will be April 27-28th at the Blue Sky Sports Complex in Middletown NY, hosted by National Ultimate.

Division-III Women's and Men's Regionals will be April 27-28th at the Batavia Soccer Park in Batavia NY, hosted by Nickel City Ultimate.