Div
II Management Council freezes regional alignment for two
years
Task force to consider possible changes
July 30, 2004
BALTIMORE -- Division II traditionally has regarded regional competition as one
of its basic beliefs, but recent issues in several sports have prompted questions
about the application of the philosophy.
 With that in mind, the Division II Management Council at its July 19-20 meeting
agreed to establish a task force to review how competition regions are established
and maintained.
The principal catalyst for the review was a recent Division II Championships
Committee decision to realign the South and South Atlantic men's and women's
basketball regions. The Committee approved a recommendation moving the Carolinas-Virginia
Athletics Conference to the South Atlantic region and the Central
Intercollegiate Athletic Association to the East region, effective
2005-06.
Regional-alignment issues have caused controversy at one time or
another in virtually every Division II sport.
"We need to step back, as we have in many other instances, and look at
how we deal with regionalization," said Sue Willey, Management Council
chair and director of athletics at the University of Indianapolis. "We
need to look at the issue by sport, by state and by conference. We don't want
to send the message that the committees were wrong with what they did. We may
very well come back to where they are, but we need to look at this in a broad
way."
The Council seemed especially concerned with how frequently regional alignments
change among various sports. The result has been diminished membership understanding
and support of Division II's regional philosophy, along with poor public and
media comprehension about what regional competition means from year to year.
The Council directed the Division II Championships Committee to establish
a task force to consider all options, including an approach that would -- as
much as possible -- affiliate institutions, rather than the institution's individual
sports, in particular regions (some sports, such as lacrosse, are so regional
that a blanket national approach would not work). The task force also will
explore whether conference members necessarily need to be grouped in the same
regions.
The task force also was encouraged to develop a structure in which regional
alignments would be reviewed far less often -- perhaps once every five years
-- than the annual assessments that currently are the norm. To stabilize matters
while the issue is under review, the Management Council voted to freeze current
regional alignments for conferences for the next two years. The task force
will be asked to look at piloting suggested changes to regionalization policies
in volleyball as early as fall 2005. The Management Council noted that volleyball
has significant imbalance in the total number of schools in the schools from
region to region.
In other action, the Management Council aproved a Membership Committee recomendation
to advance Stillman College into the second year of
membership reclassification period, with conditions.
The Management Council also noted that
Clafin University had applied
to begin provisional membership, and that Langston University had applied
to initiate the exploratory period (provisional).
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