The Men’s and Women’s Skiing Committee will change the format of the awards ceremonies at the national championship, making the presentations on the day each race is contested rather than waiting until the final day of competition.

The committee made the change during its recent annual meeting.

For example, at the 2009 championship, individual awards for the top eight place finishers in each event were awarded March 14, the final day of the competition. Under the new format, individual awards for each event will be handed out the day the event is staged. If the men’s and women’s giant slalom are both run on the first day of competition (as they were in 2009), the awards ceremonies for those events will also be that day.

The change is designed to take advantage of the exhilaration student-athletes and fans feel at the end of a race.

“We want to capture some of the excitement of the day for those student-athletes,” said Drew Galbraith, chair of the committee and senior associate athletics director at Dartmouth. “While the awards at the very end of the championship are certainly rewarding for all the athletes involved, sometimes some of the enthusiasm of the championship is lost. Our goal is to be able to give the student-athletes, the coaches and the spectators an opportunity to share in the genuine emotion of that day’s competition.”

In other business at the panel’s meeting, the committee decided to consider standardizing the slalom gate size to 30 millimeters. Galbraith said Eastern schools generally use 27-milimeter gates, while Western programs use 30 millimeters.

“As we look at the types of competitions that our student-athletes engage in throughout the course of the season, not just at the championships, we want to make sure that if there are ways to standardize what student-athletes see all year long, we would like to,” Galbraith said. “We don’t want student-athletes to be surprised at the championships by a gate size and give one region’s athletes an advantage over another.”

The NCAA championship currently adopts the standards of whichever region plays host.

The committee also proposed the following rules changes:

• To allow student-athletes to wear one flag patch (country state or city) on the uniform or equipment.
• To require ear flaps on helmets, compliant with national and international standards.
• To disqualify a skier receiving assistance in recovering lost equipment, clarifying that as long as the skier is able to recover the equipment without assistance, he or she will not be disqualified.