Inside the NESCAC Hamilton to fully integrate into the NESCAC by 2011-2012 season

The presidents of the 11 NESCAC member institutions voted on April 15 to make Hamilton College a full-playing member of the conference by the 2011-2012 athletics season, it was announced last Thursday.
    The Continentals had maintained an affiliation with the New York-based Liberty League in seven sports -- men's and women's basketball, men's and women's lacrosse, men's and women's soccer and field hockey -- since the NESCAC formally organized ahead of the 2000-01 season. Following a two-year transition period, however, Hamilton will completely integrate into the league for which it was a charter member.
"They'll be joining in seven different sports, and they have seen a good deal of success in some of those," NESCAC Executive Director Andrea Savage said. "We've been fortunate in that the teams that are in right now have been very successful, so I think it will just add to the great competition within the conference. There's no doubt about that."
    Despite its partial membership in the Liberty League, Hamilton had been abiding by NESCAC policies governing starting dates and number of contests and practices in all 28 of its varsity programs. Thus, besides creating a considerable amount of confusion, Hamilton's dual membership was also putting its student-athletes at a competitive disadvantage, prompting the school to petition for full integration into the NESCAC.
"We have certainly enjoyed our partnership with the Liberty League, but we had reached a point where philosophically, we feel more comfortably aligned with the NESCAC schools," Hamilton Athletic Director John Hind said.
"As an example, we're abiding by NESCAC rules for starting dates in lacrosse, which means we can't start practice till Feb. 15; meanwhile, everybody in the Liberty League is getting started as soon as they get back from semester break, so they're playing for two or three weeks longer than us," he continued. "We still have to compete with them on opening day, but they have that much more of a base underneath them. That was happening across all seven sports."
    Most of the two-year lag between now and the time Hamilton completes its integration into the NESCAC will be spent rearranging the league's schedule in the seven affected sports, all of which currently feature 10 teams.
The even number simplified scheduling, particularly in basketball, where each conference member was assigned a travel partner with whom it played common opponents in each weekend of NESCAC play. The addition of an 11th team, however, will require that the conference tweak its schedule to accommodate an odd number of teams, though Savage said the league plans to maintain the travel partner system in basketball.
    Hamilton's location further complicates the rescheduling process. The school's campus in Clinton, N.Y. is located roughly 140 miles away from Williams, its closest NESCAC competitor, and anywhere between 400 and 450 miles from three conference opponents in Maine. The league acknowledged Hamilton's distance would play a factor in deciding how to structure schedules from 2011 onward.
"We take travel into account whether it's Colby going to Conn. College or Tufts going to Middlebury," Savage said. "When we look at the scheduling, if someone is making a long trip, we take things like minimizing missed class time into consideration. That will certainly be taken into account bringing Hamilton into the schedule, just as it is with the rest of the scheduling we do."
    In a period of economic downturn, the league will likely see an increase in travel costs as a result of Hamilton's integration, but Hind downplayed its significance.
"It's really not as great of a cost increase as you might see it," he said. "For instance, the greatest charge for the bus is the original getting the charter for the bus. Yes, it costs more for us to travel to Tufts than to travel to Williams, but it's not twice as much even though it's twice as far."
The presence of an 11th team likely will not, however, impact postseason play. In each of the seven sports where Hamilton does not hold a NESCAC membership, the top eight teams currently qualify for the conference tournament and earn the right to compete for the NESCAC's automatic bid to the NCAA championships, something that isn't expected to change when Hamilton comes on board.
"Right now, as we look at things, the plan will be to keep eight, so Hamilton coming in will not affect that," Savage said. "We will continue our conversations over the next 12 months or so in reviewing scheduling options and tournaments, but right now, the plan is to maintain the eight teams in the tournament."
    The transition time was also implemented with consideration for the Liberty League, which will be down to nine full-time members once Hamilton departs. Hind said the league has discussed a possible reshaping of its membership but declined to discuss what that specifically entailed.
    "Of vital importance to us was an appropriate separation from the Liberty League to not leave them in the lurch," he said. "We felt as though a two-year period … was fair to that league as an exit strategy."
    Of the 21 Hamilton squads that currently have a NESCAC affiliation, the Continentals' golf team has been the most successful, winning the school's most recent NESCAC championship in 2003. Hamilton's NESCAC success has been otherwise limited, however. Of the four NESCAC titles the Continentals have captured all-time, only one has come from outside the golf program, courtesy of the 1988 men's cross country team. Meanwhile, Hamilton's baseball and softball squads have never qualified for the NESCAC Tournament, and neither tennis team has won a match against a conference opponent since 2006.
    But the seven programs that will enter the NESCAC in 2011, some of which are competitive on a national level, will undoubtedly raise Hamilton's profile within the conference. Both Continental soccer squads have appeared in the NCAA Tournament in recent seasons, with the women making a 2007 run that featured wins over Tufts and Williams, while in men's basketball, Hamilton has perennially been at or near the top of the Liberty League. The most notable addition, however, could be in women's lacrosse, where the 2008 national champion Continentals will join a cutthroat league that had five schools ranked in the most recent national top 20.
"We feel as though we're all highly competitive academic institutions, and this is just one other area of our college now where we'll have an opportunity to present incredibly competitive situations for our student-athletes," Hind said. "We have some programs who have struggled, and we will need to work on getting up to a higher competitive level. We certainly want to be competitive everywhere we can be. And we have some programs where we think we make the NESCAC even more competitive than it has been."