The NCAA Division I outdoor regional first rounds will run from Wednesday 27 May to Saturday 30 May at the University of Kentucky's UK Track & Field Complex in Lexington and at Arkansas's John McDonnell Field in Fayetteville, with declarations closing at 5pm Eastern on Monday 25 May. Each region accepts 48 declared athletes per event and 24 declared relay teams, giving a combined first-round field of 1,152 individual entries and 192 relay quartets across the two sites — the largest qualification pool in NCAA outdoor history.
Lexington draws the East Region for the third year in a row, with Florida, Georgia, North Carolina A&T and a deeper than usual Big Ten contingent likely to dominate the team scoring. Kentucky's facility holds 4,500 spectators in the new lower bowl, and tickets for the four-day session went on sale on 28 April through the Kentucky Athletics box office. UK head coach Lonnie Greene told reporters at last week's SEC media day that the host crews will lay an extended warm-up infield in the long-jump runway to absorb the volume of multi-event athletes contesting heptathlon and decathlon on the second weekend.
Fayetteville hosts the West Region from John McDonnell Field, the venue that has produced four of the last five NCAA outdoor team titles on the men's side. USC, Texas Tech, Oregon, Texas A&M and a Texas team coming off the SEC outdoor sweep are projected to contest the team standings most aggressively, with the West also drawing the bulk of the SEC's distance roster. BYU's Jane Hedengren, the new outdoor 5,000m collegiate record holder, will run the double of 5,000m and 10,000m in Fayetteville and is the first athlete since Karissa Schweizer to enter regionals with both championship records on her name.
Top 12 athletes in each event at each site advance to the NCAA Outdoor Championships at Hayward Field in Eugene from 10 to 13 June. The 12-deep advancement model has been in place since 2022 and replaced the previous descending-order system; under the current rules the slowest qualifier from each regional final still gets the same lane assignment treatment as the fastest, and time-only qualifiers are no longer accepted from the regional rounds. Multi-event athletes contest a single combined site, with the 24 highest-scoring decathletes and heptathletes from the regular season pre-qualified into Eugene without running through Lexington or Fayetteville.
Television coverage of all four days at both venues runs on ESPN+ from 4pm Eastern on the Wednesday and Friday and from 5pm on Thursday and Saturday, with selected event windows lifted to ESPN2 on Saturday afternoon. The Eugene final is fully on ESPN networks the following Wednesday through Saturday, with the women's 800m, men's 1,500m and the two 4x400m relays positioned as the headline closing events. Full session-by-session schedules and the alphabetical declaration lists for both regional sites will be posted by USTFCCCA on Tuesday 26 May, the day after declarations close.