With the 2025 USATF Outdoor Championships coming up next week, there will be plenty of time to speculate, make predictions, and generally get hyped up now that entries are closed and declarations will start to trickle in.

Before we even get there, however, let’s leapfrog this year’s edition into the future. World Athletics is almost too comfortable tinkering with its meet formats, whether it’s the introduction of the mixed-gender relay, the newly-planned “Ultimate Championships” in off-years, or the constant specter of loonier ideas like the long jump takeoff zone. But USATF rarely, if ever, messes with its tried-and-true national trials format, sticking steadfastly to a relatively predictable schedule and top-three-make-the-team selection policy.

Generally speaking, that’s great!

We like USAs; it’s a fun, high-stakes meet that (in non-Olympic years) is packed with action but shorter and easier to digest than a full global championship. But even a great product can be improved. And there’s one thing that both the World and NCAA Championships have that USAs is missing: relays.

Relays at a national championship aren’t new by any means. Countries from Kenya to Spain and everywhere in between feature 4x100s and 4x400s already. But the U.S.—where clubs play an extremely limited role in its professional track and field ecosystem—hasn’t yet seen the appeal of ending a championship with baton-based action, and so we select our relay squads for Worlds using a somewhat murky selection procedure of top finishers in the open events.

So here’s an idea worth at least piloting… instead of selecting the six legs of the 4x100m using the top finishers in the 100m and 200m finals, run one straight-final 4x100m at the end of USAs with a winner-take-all approach: top finishing team gets four of six relay spots. The additional two spots can then be filled by the top two finishers in the men’s and women’s 100m (or the top two to accept them, should someone defer).

Entire training groups could run together (think Dennis Mitchell’s women sprinters) or ad-hoc all-star teams could form in the weeks and days leading up to the race. Either option would presumably lead to better team synergy than our current setup. To create even more intrigue, USATF could leave the declarations open until the final day of competition, allowing athletes to assemble teams or trade spots at the last minute. It would open the door for more non-100-meter specialists to land on the relay (are you reading this, Grant Holloway?) and give athletes only entered in one event, like Aleia Hobbs or Erriyon Knighton, a bit more TV time.

The downside, ultimately, would be less flexibility for Team USA to field the strongest—on paper—possible team at Worlds. But unless something totally crazy happens, any team featuring the 1-2 finishers from USAs plus up to four sprinters capable of getting the stick around quickest in Eugene should be capable of contending with any nation in the world for gold, even Jamaica. And no one previously eligible for the relay pool would be explicitly excluded from a shot at the team—you simply need to find three friends and get the job done on the day. If anything, that’s more in keeping with our current selection process than nebulous, political decision making by a coaching staff behind closed doors. Heck, we might accidentally stumble into better outcomes overall if the 4x1s we choose have more practice and better chemistry…

Ending USAs with a high-stakes 4x100m race would be an entertaining addition to the program without adding much in terms of time or stress. It would create an opportunity for redemption arcs of athletes that miss the final and another chance to give our sport’s most recognizable faces a few more minutes on screen. As Wayne Gretzky probably would’ve said if he was a runner: “you drop 100 percent of the batons you don’t carry.”

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