Category Archives: Mid-Atlantic shuffle

Conference shuffle drifts south

Posted on by

The announcement today of Shenandoah joining the Old Dominion Athletic Conference has the potential to restart the rearrangement of conference affiliations that started with the departure of football schools from the MAC, the creation of the Landmark Conference for all sports and has reached as far north as the Empire 8 and Liberty League.

Shenandoah’s departure, which takes effect with the 2012-13 season, leaves the USA South in a big hole. All of their men’s sports, other than football, face the potential of losing their automatic bid. Just six full-time members of the conference have men’s sports: Averett, Christopher Newport, Ferrum, Greensboro, Methodist and North Carolina Wesleyan. In football, Maryville is an associate member of the USA South, leaving the conference with the minimum seven members required for an automatic bid.

After a two-year grace period, the automatic bid could be lost in 2014-15.

Could this revive the dormant, some would say dead, USAC-Great South merger talks? Absolutely. The USA South’s Maryville is already an associate member of the league in football and could join for all sports, as could Piedmont and LaGrange. Piedmont is the closest school of the southern portion of the GSAC to the USAC footprint.

If the southern flank of the USA South opens up, might Christopher Newport be the next to leave? The Captains would be the next geographic outlier in this group and, in my opinion, are a good fit for the Capital Athletic Conference. They would also bring a football program that could put the CAC on the verge of being a football conference. Stevenson adds football in 2012, while Salisbury, Frostburg and Wesley already have the sport. Five football programs isn’t seven, but it’s in the ballpark and who knows, Pool B might not be so bad a place to be for a while in football.

Plus, remember the women’s programs in the USA South and the Great South vastly outnumber the men’s. They could well spin off and form their own conference which would be eligible for an automatic bid as well. That group could draw from the following schools: Agnes Scott, Mary Baldwin, Meredith, Peace, Salem, Spelman, Wesleyan (Ga.). They might find that type of affiliation more to their liking.

The MAC had to be considered a strong contender to land Shenandoah. The conference already is home to a handful of Shenandoah’s sports: field hockey and men’s and women’s indoor track and track and field. The conference added Stevenson as an affiliate member for football and Shenandoah would have made it 10 in that sport. But the MAC missed out.

D-III newbies look peachy

Posted on by

Three schools were approved for provisional membership in Division III this upcoming season, according to a news release from one of the schools. (The NCAA doesn’t appear to have said anything on the subject yet.)

Covenant College, in Lookout Mountain, Ga., and Berry College, in Mount Berry, Ga., join Division III, chipping into the NAIA’s dominance of the Southeast, as does Penn State-Abington.

Covenant's Crosson Reed “Both academically and athletically, NCAA Division III is a good fit for Berry,” said Steve Briggs, Berry’s president. “We have always placed a high priority on academic achievement and the overall quality of the educational experience for our student-athletes, and affiliation with Division III allows us to be true to these fundamental values while also growing our athletic program in new and exciting ways.”

Berry’s release mentions something else that doesn’t get a lot of discussion around here: the shorter seasons in Division III. NAIA starts basketball competition, for example, weeks before Division III schools do, resulting in increased class time missed. Covenant references Division III’s lower dues, reduced travel time and expenses, and costs of postseason play which are picked up.

Berry is adding men’s and women’s swimming and diving and softball for the upcoming school year, as well as women’s lacrosse in the spring of 2011, as Division III requires sponsorship of more sports than the NAIA does.

Covenant has 13 sports already, while Abington has 12. Neither will need to add sports to make the Division III minimum.

Obviously the entire future of the Great South Athletic Conference is up in the air, with talks continuing that they may end up merging with the USA South. But if the GSAC remains an independent unit, Covenant and Berry would be an ideal geographic fit.

Bard to the Liberty League. Oh, and RIT.

Posted on by

With all respect to Rochester Institute of Technology, I think the decision to admit Bard to the Liberty League is the most intriguing part of the transaction that we broke the news about last week and was formally announced today.

(Are you following us on Twitter yet?)

It’s the case of Bard continuing to climb the conference-level ladder over the past few years despite not becoming more competitive. Yes, the soccer teams were around .500 last year, the cross country teams did well in the Skyline meet and there were some bright spots, but .500 in the Skyline does not equal .500 in the Liberty League. Bard lost to Vassar, a team around the .500 mark, 5-0 in men’s soccer and 6-0 in women’s soccer. And it’s an even longer way from the NEAC, where Bard was until two years ago, to the Liberty League.

In men’s basketball, Bard went 1-24 this past season and did not play a Liberty League team. The women were 5-20. Until the past two seasons, Bard women’s basketball did not even play a full 25-game schedule.

Bard is getting into a league with a lot of schools with similar academic goals and the like. But it’s not at all on the same playing field athletically. Bard reported to the U.S. Department of Education that it spent $556,802 on athletics in the last reported year. I won’t compare them to the schools in the LL with Division I hockey, but compared to the $2.28 million that Vassar spent that year, it’s clear Bard is not in the ballpark.

One can only hope that the school made the conference some assurances that it would cut into that gap and take athletics a little more seriously.

CAC loses an original member

Posted on by

The Mid-Atlantic Shuffle continues this offseason, as the NEAC shores up its automatic bid by admitting Gallaudet for the 2010-11 season.

Now, neither Division III school in the nation’s capital will be a member of the Capital Athletic Conference. Catholic left for the Landmark Conference early in the shuffle.

When we last left the NEAC, they were dipping into Texas in hopes of maintaining their tenuous automatic bid. With no details, we were left to wonder whether they were going to incorporate the University of Dallas into their round-robin schedule or base their entire automatic bid on a three-game conference tournament.

They chose the latter.

With two members who are still in the provisional membership stage of joining Division III, the league needed a D-III member to tide them over. Gallaudet will fill that hole and allow the league to cut ties with Dallas if it chooses.

Although Gallaudet was on probation with the Capital Athletic Conference, they were not booted from the conference, rather, they left of their own accord. And in the NEAC, they will spend a lot more money on travel, but they should be somewhat competitive in some sports.

Even I am beginning to get lost with the shuffling. D’Youville is out of the NEAC for next year, shuffling to the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference. The AMCC seems like it will lose Frostburg State, which was just offered membership in the Capital Athletic Conference for 2010-11. With Stevenson’s football program all but a done deal, perhaps for 2011, that would give the CAC four football programs: Frostburg State, Salisbury, Stevenson and Wesley.

The NEAC 2009-10 lineup looks like this: Cazenovia, Keuka, Penn State-Abington (provisional D-III), Penn State-Berks, Penn State-Harrisburg (provisional D-III), St. Elizabeth (no men’s basketball), SUNY-Cobleskill (provisional D-III), SUNY-Morrisville (provisional D-III), SUNYIT, University of Dallas, Wells (no women’s basketball) and Wilson (no men’s basketball).

With the CAC in a position to potentially sponsor football in 2011, more pieces will fall. Stay tuned.

Dallas and the NEAC

Posted on by

In an era where the price of a barrel of oil has gone through the roof, where air travel has become slower, more expensive and less convenient and where conferences as big as the WAC have talked about making changes to their schedules to save money, the North Eastern Athletic Conference has expanded into that bastion of the Northeast: Dallas, Texas.

I almost don’t have to say anything more, do I?

This is what pursuit of the automatic bid can do to you. We don’t know how the conference will schedule itself this season or how it will actually determine who gets the AQ (remember, that’s the conference’s decision, not the NCAA’s), but at some point, someone will be getting on a plane from New York or Pennsylvania to Dallas and seemingly vice versa.

I’m not sure this is what Division III is all about. I can’t imagine what the Division IV crowd would think of such a thing. I also can’t imagine what these schools are thinking: It’s not like these are the University of Chicagos, NYUs and Case Western Reserves of the world, large research institutions with endowments to match. The NEAC is made up of athletic departments so small that one coach told me a couple years ago their program could only schedule 22 games because that was all they could afford, not the Division III standard 25.

I feel for the University of Dallas, which has lived the lonely life of an independent ever since leaving the American Southwest Conference early this decade in hopes of gaining admission to the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference. And I feel for the NEAC, which has seen its membership change faster than the Law & Order cast,  but I can’t see spending all this money in pursuit of an automatic bid. And if the conference doesn’t play a full round-robin in order to save money, then why bother? You’d only be crowing an illegitimate champ.

Championship access is all well and good, but at what cost?