The Division III Championships Committee formally has recommended funding during the next two-year budget cycle several previously listed priorities — including a third annual increase in team per diem and increased fees for officials who work Division III championships.

The committee, which met January 17-20 in Key West, Florida, also recommended $800,000 in new initiatives for the biennial budget beginning in fall 2006 — including participant awards for all student-athletes competing in championships and expansion for the first time in seven years of the Division III Men’s and Women’s Cross Country Championships field.

Committee members forwarded recommendations totaling more than $1.2 million in additional spending for review by the Division III Budget Committee and ultimately by the Division III Management and Presidents Councils.

“We feel very good about moving these forward for approval by the Budget Committee,” said John Cochrane, commissioner of the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and committee chair.

“In dealing with a budget, it’s a process of prioritizing, and hoping your top priorities are approved,” he said. “This year, I think we’ve been as comfortable as we’ve ever been — at least in my experience with  the Championships Committee — with the amount of dollars we thought would be available to us, and the significance of the initiatives that we were going to be able to implement with those dollars.”

The recommendations follow through on previous commitments to seek increases in team per diem and officials’ fees — actions that serve to improve the student-athlete experience at championships by covering more of participants’ daily expenses and improving quality of competition by obtaining the best officiating possible.

If approved, team per diem would increase to $75 during 2006-07 — the third $5 per day increase in three years for championships participants — while the proposed increase in officials fees follows reviews of requests submitted by various sports committees in that area.

“It’s something that hasn’t been addressed in a number of our sports for almost 10 years, and we were falling woefully behind in that area — it was affecting the quality of individuals we were able to attract to our events,” Cochrane said.

Other committee funding priorities include an increase in officials’ per diem and increases in the travel party for four sports — baseball, men’s and women’s basketball, and women’s rowing — that currently are permitted fewer than the Division III team championships norm of five nonstudent-athletes.

New initiatives

Participant awards at championships and expansion of the cross country championships’ fields lead a variety of new initiatives recommended by the committee for funding.

The cross country proposal calls for an increase in teams from 24 to 32 per gender and also would add nine male and nine female individual competitors (an increase from 47 to 56 each). The expanded fields would be in place for the 2006 championships.

The committee also is recommending funding of initiatives ranging from Web-casting of all team championships during 2006-07 to predetermination of all eight preliminary-round sites in the Division III Softball Championship to enlarging officiating crews for the Division III Football Championship to seven members.

“That’s a significant step for the Championships Committee to take,” Cochrane said of the increase in football officials. “We were very conscious in our review of that particular proposal that, by going in that direction, we really indirectly were requiring a number of conferences to move to seven officials, and conscious that the financial impact of making a change at the championship level is often significant when it filters down to the conference level.”

In this case, the committee decided that many conferences already are moving toward seven-official crews, thus supporting the action.

The committee’s budgetary recommendations cap a months-long process that included meetings with chairs of Division III sports committees and extensive discussions during Championships Committee meetings to establish funding priorities.

“With the biennial budget process, we’re able to work almost a full year out in prioritizing and discussing initiatives that are going to have a financial impact,” Cochrane said. “By the time we get to our January meeting where it’s time to approve or deny those things, we’ve had at least two or three meetings to address them and develop a good feel for where we were going to be. That has been a positive byproduct of biennial budgets — the ability to plan ahead.

“For the most part, we knew going into the January meeting what we were going to be able to do.”

Selection criteria

The committee, during a continuing review of championships selection criteria, also acted on concerns recently expressed about a proposal to permit designation of games played outside a region during a defined institutional break as in-region contests.

Two specific concerns — about how teams would notify opponents about designation of a game as an in-region contest and the probable difficulty of obtaining both teams’ consent for that designation — prompted the committee to abandon the proposal, which it first recommended to the Division III Management Council last year.

“When discussing the specifics of implementing the proposal, it became apparent there were some logistical hurdles that were going to be difficult to clear,” Cochrane said.

However, because the Division III membership continues to show interest in achieving more flexibility in regional scheduling, the committee is studying another approach — designating games played between teams in one of the four geographical regions defined in Constitution Article 4.12 in the Division III Manual as in-region contests.

Under that approach, games between teams in the nine states (and the District of Columbia) of Region 1 would count as in-region games, as would games between teams in the two states (New York and Pennsylvania) of Region 2, the 15 states (and Puerto Rico) of Region 3, and the 24 states of Region 4.

Games between teams in defined sport-specific regions still would be counted as in-region games under the proposal, as would games played against institutions within a 200-mile radius of a campus.

“We’ve looked at ways in which we could expand the number of in-region opportunities for our institutions, yet stay within the concept of regionalization,” Cochrane said. “We looked at the breakdown of the membership in Article 4.12, and it appears to us to be a very good compromise — expanding the area included in each region, and balancing the number of schools for the most part in each region, which already has been done in Article 4.”

The committee will forward that concept to the Management Council for consideration.

Committee members also moved toward establishing new selection criteria for use by sports committees that are intended to benefit teams that are members of strong conferences or play games during a season against more-challenging opponents.

The committee agreed to adopt one of two proposed criteria, “opponents’ opponents’ average winning percentage,” beginning in fall 2006 — provided that the logistics of collecting data and performing calculations can be worked out.

It also agreed to seek sports committees’ feedback this summer on a second criterion, “opponents’ average winning percentage,” before moving toward its implementation in fall 2007.

“A goal of the committee over the past year has been to develop and implement a true strength-of-schedule component in our criteria,” Cochrane said. “The component we have now, the “quality of wins index,” is not a very accurate measure of an institution’s strength of schedule.

“For years, we’ve talked about the importance of encouraging our institutions to play the best teams within their region that they possibly can, but our criteria haven’t rewarded institutions for doing so in near as strong a way as we would like. We’re hoping this gets us closer to that objective.”

Cochrane said the actions regarding selection criteria — to achieve greater flexibility in scheduling in-region contests and reward teams for playing challenging schedules — address concerns that were behind membership proposals that were offered, then withdrawn, at the 2006 Convention.

“At the same time (member conferences) were deciding to sponsor those proposals, those ideals and initiatives also were on our agenda, so we were working toward similar goals,” he said. “We really haven’t changed our direction in response to those proposals, but simply reaffirmed our commitment to continue to look for ways to inject flexibility, and to come up with a truer reward for institutions that play in difficult conferences or play more difficult schedules. Those were the two concerns that were primarily being addressed by those proposals.”

Other highlights

Division III Championships Committee

January 17-20/Key West, Florida

* Reviewed results of a membership survey indicating strong opposition to moving Division III men’s and women’s golf and tennis championships from the spring to the fall, and decided not to recommend any change. The survey also revealed support for establishing defined nontraditional and traditional seasons in men’s and women’s golf and tennis, prompting the committee to refer the issue to the Division III Management Council Playing and Practice Seasons Subcommittee for consideration.

* Confirmed that bracket sizes for team championships will be based on the previous year’s sports-sponsorship numbers, but determined that pool sizes will be based on current sports-sponsorship numbers.

* Agreed, for purposes of applying primary and secondary championships selection criteria, to allow counting regional contests against institutions in Years 3 and 4 of reclassification into Division III as primary contests, in the same manner that institutions in Years 3 and 4 of provisional membership are counted.  Games against provisional members in Years 3 and 4 are treated as games against active members.

* Approved a recommendation by the Division III Women’s Tennis Committee to require teams to play a minimum of five dual matches during the spring to be considered for at-large selection to the Division III Women’s Tennis Championships, effective in 2007.