Track Meet Abbreviations: SB, NM, DNF, DQ, FS

August 10, 2026 · 7 min read

A track results sheet is dense with two and three letter codes, and nobody ever sits you down and explains them. You find out what DQ means the hard way.

Here is the whole set, in the order you are likely to meet them.

Marks and records

PR, personal record. Your fastest time or best distance ever, in that event. The standard term in American high school and college track.

PB, personal best. The same thing. PB is the international convention, PR is the American one. Anyone who tells you they are different is overthinking it. There is more on the edge cases in what counts as a PR.

SB, season best. Your best mark this season, which may be slower than your PR. Coaches often care more about SB than PR, because it tells them what you are running now.

MR, meet record. The best mark ever recorded at that particular meet.

When something goes wrong in a running event

DNF, did not finish. You started and did not complete the race.

DNS, did not start. You were entered and seeded but did not run. No judgement attached: it covers injury, a scratch late in the day, or being held out for a later event.

DQ, disqualified. The mark does not count. In running events the usual causes are a lane violation, an illegal exchange in a relay, obstruction, or a false start.

FS, false start. Leaving before the gun. Under most current rules a single false start disqualifies the athlete who commits it, which is why you will often see FS and DQ together on the same line.

SCR, scratch. Withdrawn from the event before it ran, usually by the athlete or coach.

NT, no time. No time was recorded, or none was submitted at entry. NT in an entry list means unseeded rather than slow.

When something goes wrong in a field event

NM, no mark. Every attempt was a foul or a miss, so no legal mark was recorded. It is the field event equivalent of DNF, and it happens to everyone eventually.

NH, no height. The same thing in the high jump and pole vault, where the athlete failed at their opening height.

PASS. The athlete chose not to attempt at that height. Normal tactics in the vertical jumps, not a failure.

F or X. A foul on that particular attempt. O marks a clearance in the vertical jumps, X a miss.

Wind and timing

NWI, no wind information. No wind reading was taken. It does not mean the wind was zero, it means nobody measured. An NWI mark cannot be a record, and coaches read it with caution.

w. The mark was wind-aided, meaning the tailwind exceeded the legal limit of 2.0 metres per second. You will see it written as 11.32w. The race result stands, the mark is not record-legal. Full detail in wind-legal marks explained.

FAT. Fully automatic timing, started by the gun and read from a photo finish camera.

h or HT. Hand timed, with a stopwatch. Reported to the tenth rather than the hundredth, and roughly a quarter of a second faster than the same race would read on FAT. That gap is the single most misunderstood thing in track results.

A. Mark set at altitude, which helps sprinters and hurts distance runners.

Rounds and qualifying

Q, capital. Qualified automatically, by finishing high enough in your heat.

q, lowercase. Qualified on time, as one of the next fastest across all heats. Same next round, different route, and the distinction matters enormously to the athletes on the bubble.

Prelims, semis, finals. The rounds. In a big meet you may need to run your event three times in two days.

Heat and section. The individual race within a round. Heats are usually seeded so the fastest athletes run together, generally in the last heat.

Seed time. The mark you entered with, which determines your heat and lane. See what a seed time is and why faking one backfires.

Splits

Split. Your time at a checkpoint inside the race rather than at the finish. A 400m split in an 800m, or each leg of a relay.

Negative split. Running the second half faster than the first. Generally the marker of a well-judged distance race.

Why any of this matters for recruiting

Because a college coach reads results sheets fluently and you are being read alongside everyone else.

A line that says 11.54 FAT with a wind of +1.2 tells a coach exactly what it is. A line that says 11.2 with no timing method and no wind tells them to assume the least flattering interpretation, because that is the safe assumption and they have a hundred more to get through.

That is why on TrackReels the event, mark, date, wind reading and timing method are required fields on every reel rather than optional notes, and why wind-illegal marks are labelled instead of quietly ranked. The abbreviations above are the language coaches think in, so the data is stored in that language too. You can see how it reads on any event leaderboard.