Nationals Bid Allocation

Out of 20 overall bids for each the women’s and open college divisions, each region gets two automatically, which adds up to 16 automatic bids overall. All of the remaining four bids are strength bids. The first two are called regional strength bids and go to the top two regions, which are determined by taking the rankings of the top eight teams in the region and dividing that value by eight. Only teams that play at least 10 regular season games at UPA sanctioned events are ranked. The last two bids are team strength bids. They are given to regions based on how strong the next best team in the region beyond the number of bids the region has been assigned already. So the six regions that didn’t receive a regional strength bid will compare their third highest ranked teams to the fourth highest ranked teams from the two regions that did receive a regional strength bid. A region can only receive one of each type of strength bid for a maximum of four bids to Nationals. Rankings will be updated over the course of the season and bids will be awarded after the regular season, which ends on March 28th, but before the College Series. It’s too early in the season to make any real predictions, especially since the rankings aren’t up yet, but after Pres Day, it looks likely that the Northwest and Southwest will each have four bids on the women’s side.

Rankings can be found here. The web page says rankings were supposed to begin last week, but the rankings up are from last year.

The official explanation of what I described above can be found here.