Recent outcries that followed the announcement of pairings for this year's Division III Men's and Women's Basketball Championships have again brought to the fore the need for reforming tournament structures in all Division III sports.

The current structure for Division III, guided by the ratio system, holds inherent weaknesses.

Those include:

Missed class time. Opening-round games in the middle of the week force those who do not receive byes to miss significant class time, especially if they win and move to the next round.

Gerrymandered brackets. Pairings based on odd numbers of brackets, geographic assignments for teams and selected byes limit fair pursuit of the championship.

Quality. The limited number of highly ranked teams allowed in the field negatively affects the quality of the tournament.

Fragmented tournament structures. The challenge of hosting is made more difficult due to the lack of meaningful and consistent organizational frameworks.

Given these problems, I recommend developing championship fields of 64 with games played over three weekends in the following sports: men's and women's basketball, baseball, softball, men's and women's soccer, and women's volleyball.

Other team sports (field hockey, men's and women's lacrosse, men's and women's ice hockey, and women's rowing) would be framed as rounds of four. Football would remain a five-week tournament but expand to 32 teams.

Such a plan would enhance student-athlete welfare with regard to class attendance, create a fairer playing field, enhance the quality of tournaments and improve management at local sites.

While current economic concerns within the NCAA would appear to eliminate consideration of such a plan, the opposite may in fact be true. Now may be the best time to consider such changes. Since there are broad-based concerns about limitations of the current tournament structure, many in Division III are prepared to fully engage in dialogue about the central mission of the division and how that mission should be financed.

Championships are the one thing that binds the membership together. While my institution can provide education or character development on its own, it cannot conduct championships on its own. From that perspective, the automatic-qualifying legislation made considerable sense and has benefited Division III significantly. The AQ system has allowed into the tournament a group of institutions that otherwise had limited opportunity to get there. Now it is time to open tournament access, not only to AQs but also to strong "runner-up" teams that have been excluded from the tournaments because of arbitrary limits on access.

The additional cost of expansion can be accommodated through several mechanisms. Foremost is the need to re-examine "entitlement" areas such as per diem, squad sizes and mementoes. From my perspective, the membership wants more teams in the tournament rather than more things for those teams already in the tournament.

Related to that is the need for the membership to take "ownership" of the tournaments and to provide better stewardship for Division III resources. There appears to be a laissez-faire attitude concerning tournament operations expressed by a mentality that "the NCAA pays for championships, so don't worry about the cost." A more efficient, cost-effective tournament structure should be developed through cost sharing, revenue enhancement and fiscal restraint.

Let's be active and work through these issues to provide a quality tournament for all the top teams in each sport in Division III.