By David Hill
David Hill is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management. He can be reached at dhill@MomentumMedia.com.
Athletic Management, 17.2, February/March 2005, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1702/changingdirection.htm
Charles Brown, the Director of Athletics at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, has a vivid way of describing what it’s like to look for a new conference affiliation. "It’s sort of like courting," he says. "The conference and the school court each other, and if the fit is right, there’s a marriage. It’s a very delicate process, and the stakes are often very, very high. It’s taken as seriously as anything we do."
It’s an apt comparison. Not only is there a delicate prenuptial stage when both parties are a little unsure of each other, but there is also a long-term commitment with many ramifications.
Yet, recently, athletic directors have been rethinking the matter of conference affiliation, and changing conferences has become part of many schools’ strategic planning. From the switching that Atlantic Coast Conference, Big East, and Conference USA schools were involved in last year, to the NCAA Division II North Atlantic Conference growing from eight to 13 members in three years, most schools have penciled "re-evaluate conference affiliation" into their strategic plans.
Almost every college athletic department wants to be part of a conference, but how can an administrator know when it’s time to change affiliations? When does a once-good match wear out, and how do you find your ideal partner? How do you navigate the delicate courtship ritual?
WHEN THE THRILL IS GONE
The starting point for changing a conference affiliation often comes with the recognition that the old match has worn out. Sometimes there is no definitive sign, and the pairing slowly grows cold. Other times it’s unmistakable.
Brown experienced the latter scenario when he arrived at UMBC in 1989. As soon as he took the job, campus officials told him they planned to join the East Coast Conference the following year. Then he attended his first meeting of athletic directors in the league.
"At my first official meeting in the East Coast Conference, Drexel and Delaware announced they were leaving," Brown says. "They never told us beforehand. It just happened." It turned out other schools were planning to leave as well. If the writing wasn’t on the wall, someone was standing there holding a paint brush. The conference was coming apart, and Brown and UMBC needed to look elsewhere.
Eric Hyman, Director of Athletics at Texas Christian University, faced a similar scenario. TCU had joined Conference USA in 1999 and, despite finding success in the league, it was apparent that times were changing. When eight members left in the wake of the Atlantic Coast Conference-Big East shifts in 2003 and 2004, and C-USA’s membership greatly changed, Hyman began looking around.
"Across the board, it was a heck of a league," Hyman says of C-USA. "But the reality was that, no matter what we did, it was soon going to be a very different league."
Hyman led efforts to assess the situation and analyze options, and TCU eventually settled on the Mountain West Conference, itself a league formed only several years earlier by former members of the Western Athletic Conference. "As athletic director, when you see the landscape changing, it’s your responsibility to exercise due diligence and to look at what options are available," he says.
More likely than cataclysmic changes, however, is an evolution within an athletic program that weakens the fit with a particular conference. Such was the case at Elon University. After many years in the NAIA, the North Carolina school began to enlarge and upgrade its athletic program, and it entered NCAA Division II in the early 1990s. Then in June 1997, Elon petitioned for reclassification into Division I and, two years later, joined the I-AA Big South Conference. By the summer of 2002, however, Elon was again looking for a different affiliation and joined the Southern Conference, in which it began competing in 2003-04.
The draw was the prestige of the conference—formed in 1921, the Southern Conference later gave rise to the Atlantic Coast Conference and Southeastern Conference—and the automatic berth its conference champion receives in the Division I-AA football playoffs each year, something the Big South lacked. But the change also reflected Elon’s long-term athletic and institutional goals, says Clay Hassard, Senior Associate Director of Athletics.
"I think your strategic planning is extremely important," says Hassard. "You need to know where you want to be and how you’re going to get there." The Southern Conference, he says, offered a chance to move to a new level that matched Elon’s strategy.
"The automatic qualifier for football was critical," he says, "and we also felt like it was a good fit academically and for the positioning of the institution."
In the case of the University of Minnesota-Duluth and the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference, they’d simply grown apart. For several years running, Duluth had won the NCAA Division II conference’s all-sports trophy, at one time winning the league tournament or regular-season title in every sport. It seemed to reflect differences in the schools themselves: Duluth was by far the largest member institution, a state regional research university in a league made up largely of private liberal arts colleges. Furthermore, Duluth plays Division I men’s and women’s ice hockey, a sport and level shared by only one other school in the NSIC.
"There was a real imbalance in terms of competition, and our athletic budget and the number of scholarships were greater than any of the other schools in the league," says Robert Corran, who was Duluth’s Athletics Director at the time. "The competitive issue really drove the change. We wanted to advance to being competitive nationally, so that wasn’t the best place for us to be. Unless there was an automatic bid into NCAA tournament play, Northern Sun schools were not being selected because there was a perception, rightly or wrongly, that the quality of competition wasn’t as good."
Duluth then joined the North Central Conference for all sports but ice hockey. "NCC schools tend to receive a lot of postseason invitations, and we felt that we needed to move to the NCC to have more opportunities to compete in NCAA play," says Corran. "Our resources were also more consistent with what other NCC schools have."
Corran found a similar poor conference match at his new job, as Director of Athletics at the University of Vermont. The state’s land-grant institution and biggest school, Vermont had been a member of the all-sports Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference, which is composed of small state schools and private colleges. Vermont was seldom competing with similar schools, and that wasn’t ideal. For instance, the Catamounts enjoyed some of their biggest home crowds for men’s ice hockey contests with neighbors University of New Hampshire, University of Maine, and University of Massachusetts, but, with those schools in different conferences, UVM played them once a year at most and only once every other year at home.
UVM has since joined America East for almost all its sport teams and will be joining Hockey East next year. The decision, however, was not based just on ticket revenue or rivalries, but on a careful examination of the university’s long-term goals.
"It would be difficult to reach a decision on a conference membership without an exhaustive look at the entire program. You need to ask questions like: What are the reasons for having this program? What does it do for the institution? What are your department goals?" says Corran. "I think conference affiliation really becomes an outgrowth of your strategic goals. It needs to be part of a broader strategic initiative."
Like Vermont, Georgia State University relied on its long-term strategies when deciding to move to a new conference. Georgia State had been quite happy in the Atlantic Sun Conference, but when it received an invitation from the Colonial Athletic Association, university administrators were ready to accept, says Tom Lewis, Vice President for External Affairs, who has oversight over intercollegiate athletics at the university.
"We didn’t sit down at a meeting two years ago and say, ‘We want to be in the Colonial,’" Lewis says. "But our vision was, at some point, when the time was right, to move to a stronger conference. It wasn’t a secret that we were looking, but we weren’t aggressive about it either—we weren’t on the phone every day talking to other conference commissioners.
"The A-Sun had picked up some private schools and we felt like the conference had made a general decision to move toward smaller schools and some private schools," Lewis continues. "So we felt like this would be a good time for us to look at other options."
SHARING THE DECISION
Approaching the conference question from a strategic, institutional standpoint has other advantages beyond finding a good fit. For one thing, it helps get people with a stake in the decision involved. At TCU, Hyman says the decision was ultimately made by the university’s chief executive and board of trustees, while his role was to be a fact-gatherer and facilitator.
"When it is happening, when you see everything begin to unfold, you’ve got to open your eyes wide to the possibilities," Hyman says. "My responsibility was to determine the facts, present them, and allow the institution to decide what’s right for TCU."
But it’s not only top-level decision makers who should be brought in. Coaches and student-athletes should be involved, or at least kept well-informed and offered a chance to give input. When Duluth administrators were considering a move to the NCC, they formed a committee of coaches to help make the decision. The group gathered the information that conference officials would need in the membership-bid process. Then the committee helped carry out the transition once a formal invitation was made.
Bob Nielson, now Duluth’s Athletic Director, was then the Head Football Coach and a member of the committee. Because there are higher scholarship allowances in the NCC than in the Northern Sun, football in particular would face a transition. But being in on the decision early helped show the coaching staff the long-term benefits the move would bring to the athletic department and the institution, he says.
It also helped the coaches see why the decision has to be an institutional one, Nielson adds. Duluth would need to fund more scholarships to meet the new league’s demands, and reaching that level would be something for the whole athletic department to strive for as a collective.
As football coach, Nielson saw the impending challenges to his sport, but came to realize it was worth it—for the school, for his program’s long-term interests, and for his student-athletes. "We recognized that we were going to face a stronger level of competition every week," he says, "and that would be a big transition. But, at the same time, our coaches became very excited about it, as did our student-athletes. The opportunity to compete on a regular basis against some of the very best teams in the region and in the country was something they wanted."
External relations can also benefit from an institution-based approach. A nuance of making the move lies in announcing your intentions without burning bridges to the spurned league. And that’s easier if you can show your current conference colleagues that you’re not taking the move lightly, but that you have well-thought-out, long-term institutional reasons for leaving.
"It’s important to emphasize that there is nothing personal involved, but that we’re all trying to do what’s best for our programs," Corran says. "I think that you really have to manage the communication of the decision carefully and be honest and sincere with people. And if you lay out your rationale and don’t try to be too secretive about it, the decision can work."
MAKING THE MATCH
Looking at things from the institutional point of view helps a school identify which conferences can best help meet its long-term goals and needs—the next step in changing leagues. Picking which conference to join can be obvious when there is only one or two at each level in a geographic region, but more often it comes down to keeping institutional goals in mind in order to balance conflicting interests.
"There’s no perfect league out there," Hyman says. "So you have to look at the strengths and weaknesses and then chose what’s in the best interest of your institution based on the facts you have at that point in time."
In TCU’s case, the goal was to reach a certain level of national prominence. Conference USA had helped with that, but as the league attempted to regroup in the wake of the latest major Division I-A shuffle, the university saw better opportunities in the Mountain West Conference. "Last year when we were doing our research, if you had put TCU into the Mountain West’s [football] power ratings, it was stronger than the ACC, the Big East, and the Pac-10. And that’s what our aspirations are," Hyman says. "In the Mountain West, their power ratings were so much higher and so was their attendance. That’s what TCU wanted to be associated with."
The school was criticized in Texas for leaving Conference USA just as the league was building a western division comprising many Texas universities that had been rivals in the venerable old Southwest Conference. But Hyman says there is potential for new rivalries, as many people in the Fort Worth and Dallas area seem to have a western orientation as opposed to the Midwestern and Southeastern orientation of Conference USA. And while it’s a long way from Fort Worth to the University of Utah or San Diego State University, it’s also quite a distance to Greenville, N.C., for contests with East Carolina University, Hyman notes. In the end, TCU was drawn to the potential for a higher level of competition, which played to its national-prominence goals.
Educational fit can be another major consideration. Georgia State was attracted by the strong academic reputations of many CAA members, Lewis says. The school also liked some of the academic-centered policies the league has, such as a requirement that host schools provide visiting student-athletes with computer labs.
Getting a school’s name into certain media markets is also a consideration for recruiting both student-athletes and students in general. "Looking at it from a public relations perspective, we are now competing in Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City, and Philadelphia," says Lewis about Georgia State’s impending move to the CAA. "That better positions Georgia State University before our alums and other people in those areas, making more people aware of Georgia State, which I think will help us in our overall student recruitment. And in talking to our students, even those who are somewhat anti-athletics like the idea of us being promoted, talked about, and read about in all these major market areas. They understand that it adds value to their degree."
An initially overlooked draw of the CAA is that Atlanta alumni of other league schools will be able to see their teams whenever they play Georgia State. Lewis says this fact has helped generate a bit of extra interest in Georgia State athletics in greater Atlanta. "I had no idea that some of the schools had such strong alumni bases in the Atlanta market. But they do, and we’re hearing from them now," he says.
ON THE SAME PAGE
But perhaps the most important consideration when switching conferences is whether a potential league suitor has the same view of and approach to athletics. At Minnesota-Duluth, the Northern Sun had set limits on the number of scholarships schools could offer in each sport below those set by the NCAA for Division II. The North Central does not have such additional limits. While moving would mean the school would have some financial catching up to do in certain sports, officials believed they could reach those budgetary goals through increased sponsorships, fundraising, endowment-building, as well as by making contests more fan-friendly. It would be a fair price for access to the prestige of the conference and the opportunities to stimulate natural rivalries.
"Schools that are very much alike, meaning they have similar levels of sports sponsorships, will tend to look at issues the same way," says Nielson. "If what we really want to do in college athletics is provide our student-athletes with the best possible experience, finding the right level of competition and league affiliation is critical. And for us, we feel this is the right fit.
"It’s a long-term issue," Nielson continues, "and our approach has been to realize that in the long run, it will be very positive for our athletic program."
Sidebar: Staying Put
While a new conference calling your name can be alluring, there is something to be said for staying put in your current league. From exit fees and potential upgrades to facilities and scholarship levels to a loss of stability and the perception of being disloyal, there can be significant costs to league jumping. With that in mind, sometimes the right move may be no move at all.
"Changing conferences frequently has definitely hurt us here at UMBC," says Charles Brown, Director of Athletics at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which switched leagues four times from 1989 to 2004, largely because of conference instability. "We’re a young school [begun in 1966], and we want to establish tradition. It’s hard to establish tradition when every four or five years you change conferences. So we’re hoping we’ve found a home in the America East that will be stable for years to come."
Texas Christian University is about 100 years older than UMBC, but it too has suffered somewhat from changing conferences, Athletic Director Eric Hyman says. TCU joined Conference USA in 1999, moving from the Western Athletic Conference, and is preparing to enter the Mountain West Conference in 2005.
"Although there are a lot of positives to our move, we’re now having to build new rivalries," Hyman says. "We were just beginning to establish some rivalries in Conference USA, and now we’re having to re-do the same thing. We also have to change some of our department strategies, with a new emphasis in different sports. So, certainly, there’s going to be a transition and adjustment for us."
To head off excessive changes in league affiliation, Brown says, administrators looking to change need to assess the stability of any conference they’re considering. That means building relationships and keeping your ear to the ground, but also assessing where each member stands on the future of the alliance. "You just have to keep your sensors up to make sure that you know what’s going on," he says. "That’s the best way to protect your program—its integrity and its affiliations."