This is the third and final article in a series examining the current state of Div. III athletics.
If you build it, they will come.
Due to changes handed down from the NCAA leadership in the early 1990s, postseason conference tournaments are now the most direct route to a national tournament bid. With the strong lure of an NCAA crown, and the automatic qualifier seen as the best way to do it, an explosion of new conferences has swelled the ranks of Div. III in the past decade.
"There's no doubt that this has happened, and that is one of those unintended consequences of the [automatic qualifier] legislation," Tufts Director of Athletics Bill Gehling said. "You're seeing conferences that really aren't anything other than collections of schools that don't have a lot in common coming together to get that automatic bid."
For the most part, these conferences are formed from recent immigrants from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), an alternative to the NCAA. Div. III has nearly doubled in size since its creation in 1973, and the majority of this growth is a hemorrhage of NAIA converts.
"My concern is that people join the NCAA for the wrong reasons," Gehling said. "What I don't like is the idea that people want in because there are championships funded, but that they really want nothing to do with basic underlying philosophy."
That philosophy includes a commitment to broad-based programming with an emphasis on a well-rounded academic experience for the student-athlete and is a major difference separating Div. III from its big-time cousin, Div. I.
The NCAA requires a minimum of 10 member schools for conferences to be recognized and requires seven participating schools in a sport for a conference to earn an automatic qualifier for the sport's national tournament.
The division's older, more well-established conferences sponsor over 20 championship sports: NESCAC, founded in 1971, offers 26; the mid-Atlantic Centennial Conference, founded in 1981, offers 24; and the Ohio-based North Coast Athletic Conferences (NCAC), founded in 1983, offers 22.
There are 13 tournament-style championships that use the automatic qualifier/at-large bid process. While no conference sponsors all 13, NESCAC comes the closest, missing only football. Six conferences offer 10 sports, and the most common outliers are field hockey, ice hockey and football, which is relatively expensive to sponsor.
"[Broad-based programming] is important to our member institutions, and so it's important to us as a conference," NESCAC Executive Director Andrea Savage said. "I think a lot of it goes back to the founding of our institutions, some as long as 200 years ago. Many of these other schools don't carry that rich tradition or long history within their institutions."
Savage also noted that geography may be a factor. The larger conferences are located mainly in the Northeast or Mid-Atlantic, where certain sports are more popular and have more of a regional recruiting base.
"Sports like rowing, lacrosse, field hockey, squash - they're common in New England to Mid-Atlantic, but as you get out towards the Midwest, they're rare," Savage said. "It's true of ice hockey and skiing as well. A lot of programs that our institutions sponsor become much rarer as you move farther out from New England."
Many of the conferences that have appeared in the past decade sponsor far fewer sports or have recently added one more sport to get to the minimum number for NCAA eligibility. For example, the North Atlantic Conference, founded in 1999 and elevated to automatic bid status for just six of its teams in the 2004-05 academic year, holds conference championships in just 14 sports.
Most of these schools have basketball, volleyball, soccer, baseball, softball and cross country. Sports like field hockey, squash, fencing, sailing, crew and golf are often foregone, or at least regionally concentrated.
"It just seems weird when you have schools like NESCAC schools, which have in the area of 30 varsity sports, and then there are these schools that are adding a sport just to get to that minimum number," Gehling said. "That's an example to me that says 'wait a minute.'"
Dennis Collins, the Executive Director of the NCAC, agreed.
"We value participation; no sport is more important than others, and we want to do the right thing," Collins said. "But there are some schools that have come in [to Div. III] that don't feel that way. They have a limited budget, and they want to sponsor the minimum number of sports. By channeling all their resources into a few sports, they can put themselves in a position to contend for more national championships."
Some of those schools have offered proposals that would constitute a major shift in the Div. III philosophy, like allowing a spring football season or extended out-of-season practice schedules. According to Collins and Gehling, these proposals conflict with the basic philosophy of Div. III - a commitment to broad-based programming with an emphasis on a well-rounded academic experience for the student-athlete. They also threaten the viability of multi-sport athletes, a trend largely confined to Div. III.
"A spring football season might help their football program, but that's a stretch for us because we have eight or nine teams in the spring," Collins said. "Where do you put a football team with 75 players when you have lacrosse and baseball at the same time?"
The national title chase is not the only reason for forming a conference; they also allow for easier scheduling and similar recruiting and practice regulations, and not all of these new leagues lack broad-based programming. The Liberty League (in which NESCAC member Hamilton is a member in 20 of its 26 sports) was founded in 1995 as the Upstate Collegiate Athletic Association and now sponsors 24 championship sports.
But it is an exception to what has become, to many in the division, a troubling trend. The Div. III leadership has taken recent steps to cut back on this growth and in doing so has taken steps to preserve the health of the Div. III philosophy. In addition to a strict membership cap, proposals include requiring regular assessments of member institutions, an increase in the minimum number of sports for NCAA eligibility and mandatory attendance in regional and national Div. III conventions.
"We're at odds philosophically with a lot of members in the division," Collins said. "A lot of schools are in Div. III because there's no place else to go. It's the cheapest road to the NCAA, which is considered the gold standard. We say we need a long-range plan to determine how many members we want and what that means to student-athletes and coaches."
