SAVANNAH, Georgia — The Division II Management Council moved historic changes involving championships regionalization and football postseason play closer to enactment during its April 10-11 meeting.

The Council approved extensive changes to regionalization that are designed to reduce travel and missed class time for student-athletes. The proposal, developed by the Regionalization Task Force and endorsed by the Championships Committee, also will make regions consistent from year to year and sport to sport. If the Division II Presidents Council supports the changes at its April 27 meeting, they will replace a system in which regions are determined on a sport-by-sport basis.

As for football, the Council supported development of a legislative proposal to create two national championship brackets, effective for the 2008 or 2009 seasons.

The regionalization issue passed with a large majority and the football concept was endorsed unanimously, but both topics were debated extensively.

The proposal to change regionalization was essentially the same one that was presented to the Convention in January — that is, to divide the nation into eight geographic regions based on state boundaries  and conference memberships. States with members from more than one conference would be part of more than one region. All games against conference opponents and opponents within the region would count as in-region games; also, institutions would be able to count games against opponents from contiguous states as in-region contests. Less-sponsored sports would have only two or four regions, but those regions would be created by combining regions established through the new plan.

The basic eight-region map accompanies this article.

Proponents of the plan have acknowledged that it will be impossible to satisfy every constituency, and representatives from some sports have expressed concern about how the new approach might affect their sports and their championships (baseball appears to have the most reservations).

However, the Council considered a different concern during its April 11 session.

Leon Kerry, commissioner of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, requested through a letter that his conference be moved from the proposed Atlantic Region to the Southeast Region. Kerry claimed that the  approach favored by the Championships Committee would, among other things, cause travel hardships for CIAA institutions in North Carolina and would adversely affect traditional rivalries between the CIAA and the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, Division II’s other historically black conference.

Those supporting the proposed alignment countered that no region should have more than three member conferences. Under the CIAA proposal, the Atlantic Region would be left with only the Pennsylvania State Athletic and West Virginia Athletic Conferences while the Southeast would contain the CIAA and the Carolinas-Virginia Athletic, the Peach Belt and South Atlantic Conferences. 

“If you have four conferences in a region, at-large access to the championship is diminished because you have to accommodate one more automatic qualifier,” said Jill Willson, Management Council chair and former chair of the Regionalization Task Force. “Regionalization must be based on geography, and the decision to put the CIAA in the Atlantic Region was made because it was the best fit for the Atlantic Region among the conferences in that part of the country.”

To support that point, she noted that the CIAA has five institutions that are situated farther north than any institution in conferences located in the South and Southeast Regions.

Willson, athletics director at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, added that some concerns about regional affiliation may be overblown.

“Once a school has met its commitment for in-region games,” she said, “it can play any team it wants without being penalized in the selection process. The proposal that we have sent to the Presidents Council makes it extremely easy to meet that commitment because conference games, games against schools in contiguous states and games within your region are counted as in-region contests.

“The fact is that this proposal expands options. It doesn’t restrict them.”

After the Council defeated the CIAA’s proposal to move it from the Atlantic to the Southeast Region, Eugene Hermitte of Johnson C. Smith University proposed another amendment to permit the CIAA and the SIAC to count games against one another as in-region games. Although the Council also defeated that proposal, the vote did not necessarily reflect opposition to the concept. Rather, the group was concerned that it had not had enough time to consider the ramifications of the proposal.

The Championships Committee will review the proposal in June to determine if there would be any unintended consequences to providing the CIAA and SIAC a “mission waiver” for regionalization.

If approved by the Presidents Council, the new regionalization policy would be mandatory for the 2008-09 academic year, although sports could implement it for 2007-08.

Postseason football

The Management Council’s action on football was more intermediate than the decision on regionalization. Ultimately, the group simply voted to develop a legislative proposal to create two brackets within the football championship, presumably divided along financial aid equivalency lines. The Division II Football Issues Task Force will undertake that assignment when it meets May 3-4 in Houston. The Management Council will review the detailed proposal when it meets in July and will decide at that time whether to move the proposal to the membership for a vote at the Convention.

While the action was straightforward, the discussion surrounding the issue was lively and at times revealed the divide between the larger and smaller programs within Division II.

Council members representing larger programs hesitated at the prospect of creating a second bracket for football to accommodate institutions that have committed fewer financial resources to the sport. Representatives from smaller programs responded that they are committed to football and that their financial aid position reflects only their budget limitations.

The Council ultimately recalled a commitment made at the 2005 Convention when the Pennsylvania State and Rocky Mountain Athletic Conferences proposed to lower the Division II football equivalency limit from 36 to 24. The vote was defeated by a 2-1 margin, but with an assurance that the division’s governance groups would seek to address competitive-equity concerns within the sport.

The Management Council’s vote to move forward means that the Football Issues Task Force will be asked to recommend (a) how many teams would be in the “larger-program” and “smaller-program” brackets and (b) what the ceiling for equivalencies would be for the “smaller-program” bracket.

The division’s leadership continues to worry about what might happen if an acceptable compromise cannot be achieved. Large programs are concerned that one outcome might be a new proposal to limit football equivalencies to 28 or 30. If such a proposal were to pass, it could motivate some large programs to reclassify to Division I-AA. If enough schools made such a change, it could affect the nature of the division.

With that in mind, the Council underscored the broader ramifications of the topic.

“This is a huge Division II issue,” said David Riggins, athletics director at Mars Hill College. “This could have the capacity to change Division II as we know it.”

Other points made during the discussion included the following:

The lower-level bracket could have positive membership ramifications. That level could appeal to certain NAIA or Division III members that have been considering Division II membership but that have found the current football limit of 36 too high.

• Concern was expressed that a lower level based on equivalencies might create a counter-incentive for larger programs to reduce their financial commitment. Depending on one’s perspective, that could be regarded as being financially responsible or as denying educational opportunity for student-athletes.
• If Division II chooses to break down the football championship into two brackets based on equivalency limits, might that same approach apply to other sports?
• Many Division II football-playing conferences have become large enough so that member institutions are able to fill their schedules by playing games against only one another. That means that smaller conferences are having increasing trouble finding in-region nonconference games (or nonconference games at all) and that committees have little comparative data on which to base selections. “There’s nothing wrong with regionalization,” said one member, “but we’re not doing it anymore. What we have is conference-ilization.”

Other highlights

Division II Management Council

April 10-11/Savannah, Georgia

• Approved in concept a plan that would mandate almost all coaches to be certified in first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
• Approved a proposal to add drug class “b,” anabolic agents, to the list of classes for which a medical exception may be requested.
• At the request of the Committee on Women’s Athletics, asked the Championships Committee and the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee to review the issue of using male practice players in female sports.
• Agreed to sponsor legislation for the 2007 Convention to permit a two-year college transfer student who has not previously attended a four-year institution and who was a qualifier after graduating from high school to be eligible for competition at a Division II institution during his or her first year only if the student has spent at least one full-time semester or quarter in residence at the two-year college (excluding summer sessions). Such student-athletes would be required to have a minimum grade-point average of 2.000 and to have satisfactorily completed an average of at least 12 hours of transferrable credit.
• Voted not to sponsor a Legislation Committee proposal for the 2007 Convention that would have permitted basketball coaches to coach nonscholastic teams that include the coach’s child or children.
• Referred to the new community task force a proposal that would permit institutions to donate used athletics equipment to all youth groups, including high schools, in accordance with the institution’s regular policy for discarding equipment.
• Reviewed a draft version of a booklet designed to help member institutions perform evaluations on student-athlete experiences. That booklet is expected to be available in mid-summer.
• Discussed with consultant Rich Luker the promotion of Division II through greater community involvement.
• Elected three new members to the Management Council — one at large, one representing independent institutions and one representing the Gulf South Conference. Those selections must be ratified by the Presidents Council at its April 27 meeting.
• Noted that this was the final meeting for Management Council members Carole Harris, West Liberty State College; Carl McAloose, Florida Gulf Coast University; and Dee Outlaw, University of West Alabama.