USA National Club Track and Field Championship are back at Icahn Stadium in New York this year. Time schedule of events. For the first time there are qualifying standards. Everyone who has a qualifying standard in any event is strongly encouraged to enter today, or as soon as possible, in order to get the early entry fee of $20 per athlete. Find your name in the list of CPTC members (who have valid 2007 USATF numbers!), choose your event, put in your top performance in the last 13 months (qualifying period is June 15, 2006 – July 8, 2007), your exact time, date & location of that performance. Enter in EVERY event that you have qualified – there is NO extra cost. If you need to update your seed time after this weekend, you can go back and change your time next week.

Here are the qualifying standards. Note that for the 5000, you can use a 3000 meter, 3200 meter, or 2 mile qualifying time, and for the steeplechase you can use anything from a 1500 meter to a 5000 meter time to qualify. If you have a qualifying time you should have received an e-mail from Devon Martin about specifics of how to enter. Contact Devon or Frank Morton (FMINNYC at MSN.COM) if you haven’t received it.

There are still a couple of ways to compete in this meet even if you haven’t met the qualifying standards. Every club is allowed to enter one athlete who hasn’t met the standard in each event. We will most probably have an athlete in every non-field event except for the men’s and women’s 5000 meter race walks, and the women’s 100m hurdles and 400m hurdles. If you’re interested (and hopefully have some experience) in these events please contact Frank Morton. If you have any interest/experience in any field event and you’d like to compete, please contact Devon Martin. You might even score points for the club since the top eight places score

Also, besides the “A” scoring relay, clubs may enter non-scoring relays without meeting any qualifying standards. The cost is $10 per relay before July 9. Please contact Frank Morton if you want to enter a non-scoring relay team, so that he can coordinate who is the B team or C team, etc. There are five relays available: 4 x 800, 4 x 100, sprint medley (200,100,100,400), distance medley (1200, 400, 800, 1600), and 4 x 400.