USA Field Hockey

USA Field Hockey will be utilizing the below process to assign pools for the National Club Championships, grouping teams that qualified via their performance at the Regional Club Championships.

For the 2018 NCC, USA Field Hockey will be conducting a controlled draw to create the pools. The goal is to create pools that are fair in balance by seed + USA Field Hockey ranking and that separates teams from the same region. 

Once all teams qualify from the 2018 RCC to the 2018 NCC we will assign teams into “pots” to be drawn from at random. Pots will be constructed based on the number of automatic qualifiers. Below is an example assuming there are 7 winners in an age division, 7 second place finishing teams in an age division and 2 wildcard teams, criteria is based on the number of automatic qualifiers, or 7 total RCC's in a qualifying age division.

• Pot 1 = Four highest USA Field Hockey ranked RCC winners
• Pot 2 = Next three highest USA Field Hockey ranked RCC winners + highest USA Field Hockey ranked RCC 2^nd place 
• Pot 3 = Next four highest ranked RCC 2^nd place finishers
• Pot 4 = Remaining RCC 2^nd place finishers + Wildcards

Rules:

• The team assignments to pots will vary by the amount of teams that qualify automatically per age division in all RCCs across the country.
• There will be four rounds of drawing teams from each pot.
• Only one team per pot can be drawn per round.
• Drawing starts from Pot 1 and goes through Pot 4.
• Clubs from the same region may not be drawn from pots 2, 3 or 4, except in the final round of the draw where the remaining 4 teams, one from each pot, will be grouped into a pool regardless of region.
• Clubs drawn that are from the same region in pots 2 or 3 are placed back into the drawing and cannot be drawn after.
• Clubs from the same region drawn from pot 4 will not be redrawn but will remain in the pool originally drawn for.