It's one thing that nearly everyone in the NCAA's biggest membership division instantly agrees on: Division III schools are wildly diverse in type, mission and funding.

The "fact" of diversity is so accepted that few people ever feel compelled to explain how member schools differ from each other. In a membership division with more than 420 schools, it has become a self-evident truth: Division III is diverse because it is big.

Even though the large majority of member schools -- about 80 percent -- are privately supported, they range from highly selective liberal arts colleges to church-affiliated schools to research institutions with large graduate-student enrollments. And even the 20 percent that are state-supported vary widely in size, selectivity and student demographics.

Put all those different institutions together in one room -- say, a ballroom at the annual NCAA Convention -- and the difficulty of diversity becomes evident.

"Sometimes, at the Convention, you look at legislation and wonder, what are they trying to do, what problem are they trying to address or solve?" said Rosalie M. Resch, associate director of athletics at a prestigious research institution, the University of Chicago. As a new member of the Division III Management Council, Resch is finding that understanding others' perspectives is as important a part of her role as helping shape decisions about the division's future.

"Sometimes, you don't know what the issues are or don't understand the issues," she concedes. "I hope my involvement in the Management Council helps me be more global in how I look at those Division III issues."

Alongside presidents, faculty athletics representatives, conference commissioners and student-athletes who also serve on the Council, athletics administrators like Resch regularly find themselves in meeting rooms with colleagues from a variety of backgrounds -- and regularly must remind themselves to look beyond their own day-to-day interests and concerns.

Those administrators -- ranging from Council newcomers like Resch and Kevin McHugh of The College of New Jersey, a selective public school, to veteran member Chad Yowell of Wheaton College (Massachusetts), a private liberal arts school -- agree that despite wide differences in their own backgrounds, they share a commitment on the Council to understanding and representing the diversity of the division.

"I felt -- I won't call it pressure -- but that responsibility at the first couple of meetings to represent a whole lot broader view than just your institution or conference or area of the country," said McHugh, who, as TCNJ's executive director of student development and campus programs, directs athletics at his school.

"When I came on the Council, all I ever heard was, a small group of people makes all the decisions, and they're not listening to the membership, and they just kind of go off and do their own thing," said Yowell, whose four-year Council term, which will end at the 2006 Convention, has coincided with the Future of Division III initiative.

"Well, I haven't found that at all. When you look at what we're doing now with the virtual focus groups, and with Management Council members trying to get out and meet with individual conferences -- I think we're very diverse."

"I believe the membership at large would be both pleased and surprised to listen in on conversations at the Management Council level -- and I can extend that to every committee that I've served on -- and listen to the breadth of conversation that represents viewpoints that may not be obvious in the decision," said Suzanne Coffey, associate professor of physical education and director of athletics at Bates College, who concluded Council service last year with a one-year term as chair. "The conversation always, to use a sailing metaphor, tacks back and forth through all of the possible implications for the diversity of the division before we reach a conclusion."

Sharing the same boat

As Coffey suggests, reaching consensus in a diverse body is a journey, and that's probably true, too, for Division III as a whole. Athletics administrators currently serving on the Council see the membership sharing a common vessel in that journey -- the Division III philosophy.

"The thing about Division III that's so wonderful is that it allows institutions to be true to their missions -- whether urban, suburban, rural, big, small, doctoral, bachelor's, whatever," Resch said. "You can be true to your mission and still be part of Division III."

Yowell says it is a shared commitment to Division III's overall philosophy of putting the student first that binds together institutions that otherwise might be too diverse to coexist.

"I absolutely think that's where the link comes," he said. "(Wheaton is) in an area of the country where's there's quite a diversity -- we have state schools and private schools, schools that have a lot of endowments and schools that don't. Every one of them has to deal with their programs differently, and each has their own academic mission -- and that's OK."

That's not to say that aspects of that philosophy always are understood -- or experienced -- the same way on every campus.

"There's 420-some members, and if you ask them, you're going to get a whole lot of different answers on what Division III means to them," said Richard Strockbine, a three-year Council member and director of athletics at the University of Dallas, a Catholic liberal arts institution that attracts students from across the nation.

"You talk about the student-athlete experience; that's quite different at the University of Dallas than the student-athlete experience at a small, similar-type school in New England," said Strockbine, whose institution is a bit of a rarity in Division III because it does not belong to a conference. "Our kids travel a lot more -- that's good and bad. The student-athlete experience isn't the same."

A new Council member from another institution in Texas -- state-supported Sul Ross State University -- understands what Strockbine means, and how local circumstances aren't always readily understood elsewhere in the membership.

"There are a few issues that, due to location more than anything else, it's not a matter of not being listened to -- it's just that people don't realize the situations that some of us are in," said Kay Whitley, director of athletics at Sul Ross State, whose sponsorship of sports in the isolated small community of Alpine, Texas, is minimal by Division III standards. "When they look at their travel, they look at a two- to three-hour trip as being an overnight trip; we look at it as a day trip, if we can find someone within that time frame."

But, despite those differences in circumstances, Council members tend to treasure the same philosophical values -- suggesting primary ties that bind an otherwise diverse Division III membership together:

* Strockbine: "The important thing to the University of Dallas is the philosophy statements that pertain to recruiting students and athletes the same. ... In Division III, you can find your own place, and if you don't want to take your kids out of class to go someplace, you don't have to do it. Those are the things that are important to us."

* McHugh: "We're involved in athletics, and we make no bones about the fact that we want to develop our kids to be as successful as they can be athletically, but that still has to be part of the overall process of education. Those should never have to be mutually exclusive; you can excel academically and developmentally, at the same time you're pursuing excellence athletically."

• Whitley: "Even before we were a Division III school, we treated student-athletes just like we treated other students. It's just one of those things we've done."

• Yowell: "It's not a free pass here to miss class for a game. Our students are never allowed to miss class for practices. So, it's student first."

• Resch: "In the early years of involvement in the NCAA, we were in the College Division rather than the University Division, and eventually we became a very proud Division III member. I really do believe that we believe in that idea of the student-athlete, that students need to be admitted on the same basis, and this is an extracurricular activity -- it's not why they choose the university, although it definitely influences a student's decision to come here."

• Coffey: ""We want to be able to say to our student-athletes, there is a level at which we want you to spend more time doing other things -- whether it's other extracurriculars or more time for classes. So we're going to restrict your season length and your number of contests, further in many cases than is allowable. But we're not going to decrease our emphasis on pushing you as hard as we can push you to be very good at your sport. It's the balancing act of saying, we want to push you in many different ways."

In other aspects of the philosophy, agreement is easily achieved in principle, though sometimes harder to attain in practice.

"Take the question of broad-based programs; that's one of those things that's in the eye of the beholder," Strockbine said. "People talk about schools that only have five (men's) and five (women's sports), but if you look at their student body numbers, five and five represents a significant percentage of their enrollment. You go to some of the bigger schools, and they might have 16 or 18 varsity sports, but it represents a much smaller proportion of their enrollment."

"Maybe where the differences are isn't the bedrock commitment, or the basic things, but when you're in a situation where you only can have a limited number of programs, or you're in an area of the country where you're competing with NAIA and Division II schools -- maybe that changes how you look at the day-to-day decisions you have to make," said McHugh, whose own school sponsors 21 sports.

Schools also may differ in the degrees to which they support specific sports, schedule opponents, or emphasize conference or regional competition over aspirations for national success.

"We choose not to have nontraditional seasons, as an example," Coffey said. "So, am I comfortable that other Division III schools do that? Yes, completely. Would I like to see Division III look more like the rules that Bates adheres to? Not necessarily.

"I think, in Division III, there's a big enough umbrella for all of us. When an institution or conference chooses to modify the Division III rules in a more restrictive way, and can be comfortable with that -- can be comfortable competing outside the conference, even though competitors are using a slightly different set of rules that's comfortable for them -- that's fine. Those are choices we get to make, and the NCAA Division III structure allows us to do that."

"When you're talking to student-athletes, you can say, this is what you have in common with other schools," Whitley said, discussing her institution's comfort with a philosophy that covers a selective school like Bates and urban research university like Chicago alongside her own rural, open-door state institution.

"With those basic principles, when you go out there -- if you make it beyond conference -- you're going to be playing schools where they're not receiving any type of athletics aid," Whitley said. "They have the same limitations you have, and the same benefits."

Day-to-day practice

The Council members who administer athletics programs are understandably tuned in to philosophical matters. After all, the Division III philosophy -- and a desire to ensure that athletics practices are in line with those ideals -- has been the basis for the Future of Division III initiative, which produced important legislation at the 2004 Convention and will culminate with additional proposals at the 2006 Convention.

However, even though administrators serving on the Council admit the philosophy influences the way they make day-to-day decisions on their own campuses, they don't always "wear that on our sleeve," as Yowell puts it.

"I don't think, 'I need to check the philosophy' (in making decisions), but because we've blended the philosophy into everything we do, it's a part of most -- and especially major -- decisions, such as how we spend our money, or how we are dealing with all of our sports," he said.

Resch said Chicago is explicit in publishing the Division III philosophy in its handbooks for student-athletes and athletics staff, and that it also has provided guidance in making tough decisions.

"At one point, we had a fencing program," she said. "We dropped the program, and part of the reason was we didn't feel we were able to do fencing within the Division III philosophy. We had a part-time coach, the team had to travel a lot and it wasn't competing against like institutions. And even though, as a program, it was kind of OK, philosophically it didn't really work. There were some practical things that didn't work, either, but really, philosophically, it didn't work -- they weren't competing against the same core institutions as the other teams."

In other cases, the philosophy exists more as guiding principles than a decisive factor in day-to-day operations.

"We have a young coaching staff right now, for the most part, and they get that (the philosophy) from me right from the get-go," Strockbine said. "It's pretty much understood. We have a weekly staff meeting and a lot of personal contact; we have a pretty small staff, and that makes it a different kind of an operation. I see everybody every day. We talk about the rules a lot, and they're pretty cognizant of what Division III is and what they're supposed to be doing."

McHugh says the Division III philosophy is more of an "ingrained -- though not taken for granted -- thing" at TCNJ, while Coffey says practicing the philosophy usually comes naturally at Bates -- and she believes that's true at a variety of other Division III member institutions.

"In many ways, it is organic -- it's just part of who we are," she said. "But Bates is one of the schools that, as I've done my work in Division III -- and there are many different types of institutions -- we find the Division III philosophy statement to be speaking about us. It's very easy to feel a part of Division III when you're on this campus.

"I would suggest that it's not just the type of school Bates is that lets us make that claim. It's many different types of schools."

Ultimately, it's that shared commitment to the philosophy that ties an otherwise large and diverse membership together.

"I know that the range of our institutions is always going to be a problem, but as long as each institution is being true to itself, then I'm OK with that personally, because I really believe there is a school for everyone -- and not just one," Resch said. "If, as an institution, you're serving your population well, it doesn't matter what that population is, as long as you are serving them, and creating a good environment. That's the key, and I think Division III allows you to do that."

McHugh suggested that the shared commitment ultimately trumps frustrations that arise from differences among institutions.

"When we start moving toward splitting Division III or going to another championship, people tend to get back together and say, we may disagree, but we don't disagree that much."

Council members' institutions portray Division III's diversity

Bates College: A nonsectarian, nationally recognized residential liberal arts and sciences college in Maine, with 1,700 students -- two-thirds of whom are involved in the school's 30 varsity and 12 club sports.

Suzanne Coffey on Bates athletics: "This is the kind of place where top-notch student-athletes -- and I mean top-notch in both areas -- can come and enjoy the intellectual rigor, and also enjoy being pushed to the highest levels of performance athletically."

The College of New Jersey: A selective state institution that positions itself as a public alternative to a small liberal arts college, with 5,900 undergraduate and 900 graduate students.

Kevin McHugh on TCNJ athletics: "The profile of the student-athletes we were able to bring 20 years ago, (some) of those kids might not be able to get into school here now. So from that standpoint, it's changed. But we're still in the national picture in most of the sports we sponsor, and that's really our overall goal."

University of Chicago: Private, nondenominational institution of higher learning and research, with 4,400 undergraduate students and 9,000 graduate, professional and other students.

Rosalie Resch on Chicago athletics: "It really is that Greek idea of a sound mind and a sound body. The extracurriculum enhances and enriches and broadens all of that, so you have students very active intellectually but also active in things that flow out of the academic experience."

University of Dallas: A private, Catholic liberal arts university, with 1,200 undergraduate and 1,950 graduate students.

Richard Strockbine on UD athletics: "The Catholic church has a great belief in mind, body, spirit. Athletics fits in, as well as intramurals and club sports here, in the body aspect of things -- healthy. That's how we fit in with the mission of the university."

Sul Ross State University: A state-supported regional university in Texas offering associate's, bachelor's and master's degrees, with 1,900 students.

Kay Whitley on Sul Ross State athletics: "It serves a regional purpose, but it offers kids around the state of Texas a place to refine their athletics skills. Like other Division III schools, we don't have kids who are going to be pro players; basically, their involvement in athletics helps them in going into careers like teaching, and serving in other aspects."

Wheaton College (Massachusetts): A selective liberal arts college that became coeducational in 1987 after 150 years as a women's college, with 1,550 students.

Chad Yowell on Wheaton athletics: "We played a major role, early on in coeducation, in developing this into a seven-day campus. ... In the early years, we also were a focus for recruiting men to the campus."