It’s often difficult when a school goes co-ed, and many Division III women’s schools have begun to admit men in recent years. Immaculata, Regis, Lesley, Chestnut Hill (since moved to D-II), Hood and Wheelock are among them. The Atlantic Woman’s Collegiate Conference was a casualty.

Wells College is adding men’s basketball soon as well.

Randolph-Macon Woman’s College became Randolph College after admitting men, and the transition wasn’t easy — not for the teams and certainly not for the campus.

“We applied to a women’s college, and we’re not graduating from one,” said Hillary Peabody, the student government president. “(Men) are the reality of what we don’t want to happen at our school.”

Read the full story, from the jealousy over full stands at a men’s soccer game to a group of hooded figures stalking freshmen in the school’s first co-ed class to a wake-up call in a Roanoke Times feature story by Erinn Hutkin.