The United States Sports Academy's Directors' Cup standings are in for the fall 2005 season, and Tufts finds itself in unprecedented territory: Tufts can officially call itself one of the top five athletics programs in the nation.
The Cup is awarded to the top athletics program in each division, as measured by NCAA appearances in five fall sports: football, soccer, field hockey, volleyball and cross country.
Tufts currently sits at fourth place in the rankings with 252 points, two slots ahead of perennial champion and NESCAC goliath Williams College, which has won the Cup nine times in the last ten years and for the past seven straight years.
While Tufts generally places in the top 40, the fourth-place ranking is the highest at any point in school history. After the 2004 fall rankings, Tufts was a distant 63rd, but record-setting 2005 seasons by women's soccer, volleyball, and both cross country teams launched the University past all other NESCAC schools.
Coach Martha Whiting's women's soccer squad raked in 83 points with a third-place national finish, and the regional semifinalist volleyball team earned 64 points with a ninth-place finish. Men's cross-country earned 75 points with its fifth-place finish at Nationals, and the women runners received 30 points for their 22nd-place showing.
"This is the best fall we've ever had, across the board," Sports Information Director Paul Sweeney said. "It's a credit to the coaches and athletes who are really competing at a national level. In addition to getting it done in class, they succeed in competition as well, and it's cool for us to show some of the same kind of success in athletics as in academics."
Athletic Director Bill Gehling was excited about the ranking, but stressed that the Directors' Cup is not the only, nor the most accurate, assessment of a school's athletic program, as points are awarded only for NCAA postseason appearances.
"[The ranking] is definitely a measure of wonderfully successful seasons that a lot of our teams had, but it's important to keep in mind how the Cup works," Gehling said. "A team can finish third in NESCAC, and they might legitimately be a top-10 team in the country, but not get a tournament bid, whereas another weaker team will get a bid just for winning their conference. You can have a very strong program, but not have that show [in the Directors' Cup]."
The highly-competitive nature of the NESCAC often limits access to postseason appearances, as the number of conference teams from the league that receive bids to NCAA championship tournaments is usually low, if not just one.
Furthermore, the Cup does not consider several sports at which Tufts is consistently strong, such as sailing or crew.
Ahead of Tufts is No. 3 Calvin College, the Grand Rapids, Mich. school that boasted a
second-place men's cross country team as well as regional champion volleyball and men's soccer teams. Messiah College, at No. 2, won both the men's and women's NCAA soccer championships and was a field hockey runner-up.
The College of New Jersey leads the standings. In addition to a national semifinal victory in women's soccer that ended the Jumbos' championship run, TCNJ scored points with a fifth-place men's soccer team, ninth-place field hockey and women's cross country teams, and a 10th-place men's cross country squad.
The University's No. 4 spot is unlikely to be its final ranking, as the usual suspects will likely benefit from strong winter and spring showings. Several top finishers in recent years, including Williams, Middlebury and Amherst - all top-10 last year - have historically excelled at winter and spring sports, which will likely earn them points in the final rankings.
In Division I, Notre Dame leads the pack over Penn State, Stanford, Duke, and Wisconsin. Stanford has won the Cup for a record 11 consecutive years. In Division II, Grand Valley State (Mich.) leads the standings and has won the Cup for the past two years.
Tufts is joined by two other NESCAC schools in the current Top 25 rankings. With a second-place women's cross country team, a fifth-place men's soccer finish, and a ninth-place field hockey team, Williams is in sixth place with 216 points, the school's third-lowest all-time fall total and a far cry from the record-setting 412 points it earned in 2004. Colby came in at No. 20 on the back of two fifth-place finishes, one from the women's cross country team and one from the volleyball squad which beat the Jumbos in the in the NCAA regional semifinal round.
Gehling cites the Directors' Cup as one index that he considers when evaluating the strength of Tufts athletics, but not the only one.
"No one gets more excited than me when our teams are this successful," Gehling said. "But I'm most concerned with the quality of the athletic experience that our students have. My goal is that they have tremendous success on the field and in the classroom, but really that they leave here knowing that they experienced something really special."
