By Rachel DaDamio
March 13, 2025
With the NCAA D1 indoor track and field championships coming up this weekend in Virginia Beach, Dyestat has posted really interesting stats on the 2015 vs. 2025 national qualifying times for several events (For example, Dyestat’s post about the men’s mile can be found here). I wanted to build upon their research and investigate trends in indoor results (In contrast to Dyestat’s posts, I am looking at performance lists, not accepted entries into nationals) from 2010 to 2025 for all track and field events.
To conduct this research, I used the TFRRS indoor performance lists from the 2009-2010 indoor season to this year’s indoor season (2024-2025). I looked at the first and sixteenth (For relays, I looked at the twelfth best performance rather than sixteenth) ranked performances to approximate the top of the field and national qualifiers. Here are the topics I explored:
- Events with the greatest improvement from last year (2023-2024 season) to this year (2024-2025 season).
- Year with the most events showing improvements.
- Events with the most consistent improvement.
- Total improvement over the past 15 years (2009-2010 season to 2024-2025 season).
- Projecting current trends into the future (2039-2040 season).
Events with the greatest improvement from last year to this year:
Field events stand out when comparing last season (2023-2024) to this season (2024-2025), with seven of the biggest improvements in top performance coming from the field events.
This trend holds with the 16th-ranked performances as well, with the top 7 biggest improvements coming from the field. Though the field events stand out, performance improvements extend broadly to the track as well. Notably, 30 out of 34 events showed improvement from last year to this year in their 16th-ranked performance (Exceptions were women’s high jump, men’s long jump, and men’s and women’s 4x400m).
Year with the most events showing improvements:
Though we saw improvements in most events this year in both the top and 16th-ranked performances, the 2021-2022 season had the most year-over-year event improvements. In fact, every event except the Men’s 400m saw an improvement in its 16th-ranked performance. Major developments in shoe technology, return to “normal” from COVID protocols, and extended COVID eligibility could be possible influencing factors, but more research is needed.
Not only was 2022 remarkable for the number of performance improvements, it also stood out as the year in which the most events had their largest year-over-year improvement in 16th-ranked performance (17 out of 34 events). Again, super shoes and COVID likely contributed. Moreover, many of these events experienced a decline in 2021. For example, the women’s mile and 5000m events both experienced two years of declining performance in 16th-ranked time followed by a huge improvement in 2022.
Events with the most consistent improvement:
Leading into this year’s championships, the women’s DMR has a 7-year streak of top performance improvement year-over-year. Moreover, the women’s top DMR time has seen improvement over the previous year in 12 out of the last 15 years, more than any other event. Notably, the improvements in this event have all been relatively small, with the largest improvement of 0.90% from last year to this year.
Looking at 16th-ranked performances (or 12th-ranked for relays), we see more events with similarly impressives streaks - women’s 400m (7 years), women’s long jump (6 years), men’s mile (6 years), and men’s weight throw (6 years).
Total improvement over the last 15 years:
We see an extension of the pattern we saw over the last two seasons when we look at the past 15 years. For both top performance and 16th-ranked performance, field events held the top 5 largest improvements from the 2009-2010 season to now.
Projecting current trends into the future:
As a thought experiment, I decided to extend the past 15 year performance improvements to the next 15 years to predict NCAA indoor marks for the 2039-2040 season.
The women’s 3000m was the only event where extending the improvements from the past 15 years to the next 15 years resulted in the 16th-ranked performance (5% improvement) overtaking the top performance (2.9% improvement).
Focusing on the women’s mile as an example, if we see the same improvement in top performance in the next 15 years, a collegiate woman will run just under 4:16 in the mile. Notably, this would be the #1 indoor performance in the world this year (Heather Maclean just ran 4:17:01 at BU). Interestingly enough, the 2010 world leading performance in the women’s mile was 4:23:53, which is just a hair slower than today’s NCAA lead (4:23:46 by Silan Ayyildiz of Oregon). Even though a 4:16 collegiate performance seems like a crazy prediction, 15 years ago we probably would have said the same thing about a 4:23. These kids just keep getting faster *shakes fist.*
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Rachel DaDamio
Rachel DaDamio ran at the University of Notre Dame and moved to Chicago after graduating to work as a data scientist, where she’s also training for a fall marathon.
