*UIL: Regional track meets on*

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UIL: Regional track meets on

By Lance Lahnert

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The University Interscholastic League will hold the regional track meets, reversing a decision Wednesday the 20 regional meets across the state would be cancelled because of the swine flu outbreak, University Interscholastic League director Charles Breithaupt said Thursday morning.

Breithaupt said at 11:30 a.m. UIL officials had confirmation for 19 of the 20 regional meet sites.

"We expect to put out a press release by this afternoon or Friday morning letting everybody know the dates and sites," Breithaupt said.

The 20 meets over the state were scheduled to be held Friday and Saturday. Now the meets will be conducted between May 11-16. For instance, the Region I-IA meet in Levelland will go off May 12-13, according to officials at South Plains College.

"We had some issue with some dates and conflicts with people who couldn't host the meets," Breithaupt said. "Once we have that final site secured we will be ready to go and release it."

Breithaupt said after the ruling was made to cancel the regional meets he heard from several coaches who made a legitimate argument of why the meets needed to be conducted.

If the meets had been cancelled, the top four finishers from the finals at district meet would have been the criteria to determine the state qualifiers. The normal criteria is finishing in first or second at regionals.

"Coaches were professional and weren't complaining but were just lodging the fact many of the better kids in the state didn’t give their best effort at the district meets because they didn’t have to in order to win," Breithaupt said. "Now they wouldn’t be at state because they had planned on qualifying at regional."

Breithaupt praised his staff for the large workload accomplished the past 24 hours to secure the 20 regional track meet sites.