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Is anyone's season segmented? By this I mean their institution considers track season from like September 7 - December 4 and then January 7 to end of nationals? By doing this any dates between the dates when athletes are not allowed to have mandatory practice (exams), the coaches are not allowed to be at the practices. It pretty much makes it so that starting December 5 track is in off season in the eyes of NCAA even if you just had a meet on Dec 3.

You are asking something that is specially dictated by the NCAA. Practices can start counting backwards X amount of weeks from championship time. Some schools don't allow teams to travel during finals time so even if you just had a meet on the 3rd, they are gearing up for finals, so they may not be allowed to travel on the 10th because finals start the 12 (maybe). Some schools have to deal with academical eligibility issues so they have their "intersquad" meet one of these weekends and it is just considered a practice because no one else is coming to it, then once the grades are in for January, we know who is eligible and who is not... rather than burning a season after one competition.

Counting backwards, generally all the D1,2,3 nationals happen at around the same time the "official" start date is somewhere. Meanwhile counting backwards its kind of convoluted because the language is written like a legal brief. Some coaches count finals weeks, some don't, some count time off. The 20 hour a week rule comes into affect at some point, while the 6 hour rule only applies for face time with coach, and not the warm up, cool down and it can be argued that pole vault is a safety issue not to have a coach there so vault sessions do not count....

I would encourage anyone to find a calendar and the specific language used to determine when the NCAA counts "in season" to begin and countback weeks based on what you think they means.... its not simple.