The NCAA Division I outdoor first-round meets land at Lexington's UK Track & Field Complex and Fayetteville's John McDonnell Field on 27-30 May, the four-day preliminary rounds again carrying the entire route to Hayward Field. Forty-eight declared athletes start each individual event at each site and 12 advance to the NCAA Championships in Eugene; for the relays the cut-off lands at the top 12 of 24 entered teams. Declarations close 12 May, with seedings published by USTFCCCA the following Friday.
Both venues have hosted the preliminary round before, but the 2026 edition is the first to use the revised four-day schedule across the full event card. Day-one running events at both sites have been pushed to a 4 p.m. local-time start; field events run through the morning to give shorter weather windows for the technical events. The schedule shift is intended to ease compression on the men's 10,000m, which has often been the meet's least-rested field, and gives the multi-event athletes a clean recovery night between the heptathlon and 200m.
The East site at Lexington draws programmes from the SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Northeast, with reigning team title-holder Arkansas's path to Eugene running through Fayetteville at the West. Among individual storylines, BYU freshman Jane Hedengren has been confirmed for the women's 5000m and 10,000m at the West, with the Bowerman favourite likely to run only the 5000m through to Eugene. New Mexico's Habtom Samuel has been declared at the West in the 5000m and 10,000m and is expected to defend both NCAA titles. Alabama's Doris Lemngole, the 2025 Bowerman winner who has stayed in school for one more outdoor campaign, anchors the East entries.
USC sprinter Garrett Kaalund, who set the NCAA indoor 200m American record over winter, leads a stacked East 100m and 200m field that also features Auburn's Makanakaishe Charamba and Florida's PJ Austin. The men's 400m hurdles field at the West is similarly congested at the top, with Texas A&M's Ja'Qualon Scott, Arkansas's Phillip Lemonious and Texas Tech's Caleb Dean all entering the meet inside 49 seconds. Field-event watching at Lexington centres on the Stanford pole vaulter Maddy Ulrich and the Princeton high jumper Sondra Lukin, both already inside Eugene's projected qualifying line.
Tickets and live streams are available through the NCAA's championship portal at ncaa.com, with ESPN3 carrying the running events on each evening's prime-time card. Programme finalists' lists, when published, will set up the championships at Hayward Field on 10-13 June and feed directly into the US trials cycle for the World Athletics Ultimate Championships in Budapest in mid-September. The NCAA committee has signalled that championship qualifying lines will publish before declarations close, allowing programmes to make late entry decisions on the women's 10,000m and the multi-events.