It’s a major topic these days at year-end meetings of Division III conferences.

The deadline is approaching for conferences to request — for the first time — funds from the recently revamped Division III Strategic Initiatives Grant Program, and so conferences are devoting significant time to figuring out ways to spend nearly $1.6 million during the coming year.

They’re spending a lot of time talking because it’s a new, and possibly daunting, opportunity. Previously, much of that money was distributed from the NCAA national office directly to institutions that successfully applied for grants. Beginning in 2006-07, however, conferences will receive allocations totaling an estimated $31,000 to $46,000 each — depending on a league’s size — and then decide themselves on the best ways to use the money within guidelines. Independent institutions also will receive allocations through the Association of Division III Independents.

“It takes most of the programs we’ve been administering and decentralizes them in a way that permits conferences and independents to determine what they think their most pressing needs are, and address those needs in the way they think is most effective,” said Dan Dutcher, Division III vice president.

Conferences annually will be required to use a portion of the money, known as “Tier One” funds, for professional development, education and communication involving key constituencies. Those constituencies range from institutional vice presidents who supervise athletics to faculty athletics representatives to athletics  administrators — as well as conference-based student-athlete advisory committees.

They also are expected to dedicate what amounts to the lion’s share of funds — known as “Tier Two” funds and aimed at supporting integration of athletics into institutions — to programs addressing major components of the Division III strategic plan. Those components are student-athlete well-being, sportsmanship, and diversity and gender equity.

Conferences also will receive an annual allocation — known as “Tier Three” funds — to enhance conference operations. They can be applied to a variety of purposes, including improving technology, officiating, sports training/medicine/nutrition, championships enhancements and professional development.

There are guidelines for using the funds. For example, the Tier One funds can be used only to help pay for participation in such activities as NCAA Regional Seminars or national meetings for other constituencies ranging from faculty athletics representatives to senior woman administrators to sports information directors. Also, conferences must address each of the three Tier Two strategic plan components at least once during a four-year period.

The program otherwise offers unprecedented flexibility in using the money. It also ensures that every Division III member institution can benefit from NCAA funding for nonchampionships purposes during the coming year.

That’s a major change from past years, when much of the money went only to schools that proposed programs and then applied for grants to support them.

“It’s one thing to come up with an idea and go after the funds,” said Donna Ledwin, commissioner of the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference and president of the Division III Commissioners Association. “It’s a very different perspective when someone says, here’s $25,000, here’s some general areas — how do you want to spend it? It’s like saying, take $25,000 and go to the mall — you can spend ‘x’ amount on shoes, ‘x’ on suits, and I think, ‘Oh my gosh!’

“It’s almost overwhelming when you first stop to think about it. And then, it’s kind of fun.”

Reconciling concerns

Conferences have received at least some direct funding from the NCAA since 2000. The most noteworthy examples were funds to support development of conference student-athlete advisory committees and a “technology grant” to improve operations of conference offices.

A couple of years ago, as Ohio Athletic Conference Commissioner Tim Gleason was beginning his term as president of the Division III Commissioners Association, he wondered if there might be a way to broaden the uses of the technology grant to support other conference needs.

“That was the initial thought,” Gleason said. He and fellow commissioners then began considering how other funds are distributed. “That raised questions like, we have the SAAC grant, as well as a commissioners’ meeting that the NCAA pays for — why can’t we just take that money and put it in a pile and see what we have?”

Meanwhile, the Division III governance staff grew increasingly concerned that only a limited segment of the membership actually was benefiting from grant programs requiring applications. The staff also understood that the programs were becoming more expensive to administer from the national office, due to overhead costs and growth of the programs beyond the staff’s ability to administer them effectively.

“The bottom line is that we were trying to find ways to improve programs in focus areas — membership education, student-athlete well-being and diversity — and we weren’t reaching the broadest scope of the membership,” said Bridget Belgiovine, director of Division III. “We wanted to get more of the membership to do more educational programming, by putting the money into conferences. We wanted to get more people doing more things.”

The commissioners and Division III staff — particularly Gleason and Belgiovine — began working together to find ways of reconciling those concerns.

“What we ended up doing was looking at all the different items out there, and putting them in one big pile, then separating it,” Gleason said. “We saw there were three main areas, three major dividers, of this big pile of independent dollars to do things on the Division III level. That’s when it divided out into the tiers.”

Involving constituencies

Like Ledwin suggested, conferences preparing to receive funds for the first time are in effect thinking “oh my gosh” as they gather in year-end meetings to begin discussing how to use the money.

Everyone involved in creating the program believes that conferences ultimately will find effective — and even creative — ways of using funds to advance the Division III strategic plan. However, most conferences first must establish some kind of process for deciding how to use the funds, and in some leagues, that’s the part that is creating some anxiety.

Much of that anxiety arises from a catch in the program — conferences are relatively free to decide how to spend the money, but they are expected to involve a wide range of people in the process to decide how to do so. At a minimum, they must obtain signatures on forms requesting the funds — and on year-end reports describing how the funds were used — from representatives of several constituencies within conferences: presidents/chancellors, athletics directors, faculty athletics representatives, senior woman administrators and student-athletes.

“I know some people are complaining about that, because it is somewhat cumbersome,” said Division III Management Council Chair Michael Miranda. “But ultimately I think it’s a good thing — it’s an important feature.

“With a wide variety of operating methods at the different conferences, setting up the requirement to engage all of these constituencies is really, I think, going to be helpful for them, and ultimately it will strengthen the conference,” he said. “If you have a conference that is dominated by one group, without consultation with other folks, you don’t accomplish as much — you don’t have as much investment on the campuses and you don’t have as much investment in what the conference as an entity is doing.”

Of course, even if conferences fully commit themselves to involving all of those constituencies, they still may struggle during the first year of the program to find the best ways of soliciting input and ideas. The problem unavoidably is complicated by the fact that several conferences do not have a full-time commissioner or other officer to coordinate such efforts.

Learning curve

Ledwin and Gleason think that’s where the Division III Commissioners’ Association can be most helpful — by providing a forum for learning what types of processes conferences are creating to comply with program requirements, and for gathering ideas about ways to effectively involve all the constituencies.

With a June 30 deadline approaching for conferences to request funds for 2006-07, Ledwin said the conference grant program will be a primary topic of conversation at a June 3-4 meeting of the Division III Commissioners Association in Dallas.

“I think that the commissioners’ association is going to be very important in sharing ideas and helping folks be more creative, while working out kinks in the system and the process — like seeing when a form is too unwieldy,” she said.

Gleason foresees a “learning curve” but thinks conferences will adjust fairly rapidly to the new approach.

“Conferences will be communicating with each other in the near and far future, via the Division III Commissioners Association, to help each other with ideas,” he said. “Good projects and good plans are going to spread through the ranks, and I can envision a best-practices template that could be shared nationally.

“If you can put on some binoculars and see past the initial adjustment period, this will prove to be a great program for all of us over the long haul. But there’s going to be growing pains early as leagues begin to figure it out.”

Dutcher and Belgiovine say the Division III governance structure also will be attentive as the new approach to distributing funds shakes out.

Dutcher noted that the Division III Strategic Planning Subcommittee — which includes members of the Division III Presidents and Management Councils — will oversee the program. That subcommittee will play an important role in monitoring conferences’ use of the funds and processes for involving constituencies.

Membership feedback — whether from the commissioners’ association or from other sources — also will eagerly be sought as the program rolls out during the coming year. That feedback may provide the best measurement of whether the program ultimately succeeds in benefiting the entire membership more efficiently and effectively, Belgiovine suggested.

“My guess is we won’t see it on paper,” she said. “We’re probably going to hear it, anecdotally, in a variety of ways. We’ll likely hear it at FARA meetings, in Regional Seminar conversations, and as (Management) Council members visit conferences. And we can ask student-athletes at leadership conferences one or two years from now if they’re aware of programs that resulted from direct funding from the NCAA to the conferences.”

‘Tier Two’ initiatives invite broad constituent input

From each conference’s allocation under the newly revamped Division III Strategic Initiatives Grant Program, the largest amounts — ranging from about $11,000 to as much as $26,000 depending on a conference’s size — will be allocated to “Tier Two” initiatives.

Those funds — awarded under an umbrella encompassing social responsibility and integration — specifically will target student-athlete well-being (including community-service efforts), sportsmanship, and diversity and gender equity.

“Tier II is where, I think, the division shines,” said Bridget Belgiovine, NCAA director of Division III. “It’s where we show who we are as a division, in terms of educating student-athletes in the three focus areas.”

It’s also where conferences may benefit most from a requirement that they involve a wide range of constituencies — including presidents and chancellors, athletics directors, faculty athletics representatives, senior woman administrators and student-athletes themselves — in the process of deciding how the funds will be used.

“It shouldn’t be construed that the constituent group involvement is limited to only those funds that are targeted toward that constituent group,” said Division III Management Council Chair Michael Miranda. “They need to be involved in that whole process, and I think that’s one of the major benefits.

“The idea behind this is not just, to use an example, that faculty reps only are involved in the distribution of funds for the faculty reps — they would be involved in the process by which all funds are distributed. The same goes for SWAs or student-athletes. It gives conferences a different voice, a different perspective, on some of these programs.”

Donna Ledwin, commissioner of the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference and president of the Division III Commissioners Association, said the program already has prompted her conference to take steps to involve faculty athletics representatives and senior woman administrators more fully in league activities.

As a result of student-athletes’ recently expressed interest in that conference in improving the balance between athletics and academics at member schools, the conference’s faculty representatives have been asked to propose ways to use Tier Two funds on each of their campuses to meet that objective.

The result will be compliance with a program requirement: Tier Two funds must be applied at least once during a four-year period to programs addressing student-athlete well-being, which along with sportsmanship and diversity are major components of the Division III strategic plan. And the approach also achieves one of the grant program’s primary goals — involvement of constituent groups in deciding how to address that specific component of the plan.

“One of the things this process also has done for us is make us think more about the SWAs in the conference, and what role they can play,” Ledwin said. “If you haven’t had SWAs involved, this process will encourage that; if you haven’t had FARs involved, this process will encourage it.”

The process also cements a recently reaffirmed objective of the Division III Presidents Council — to ensure that a significant portion of the Division III budget is applied to purposes other than conducting championships competition.

“As time has gone on, we’ve achieved a balance where we’re spending about 75 percent of our money on championships and about 25 percent on nonchampionships initiatives,” said Division III Vice President Dan Dutcher, who added that the Presidents Council recently formally endorsed those benchmarks to help ensure that Division III will continue to support educational and developmental programs.

Miranda thinks it is appropriate for Division III to put a significant emphasis on programs that seek to benefit student-athletes away from the playing field or court — and says the new grant program offers a means of doing so.

“When we identify issues that need to be addressed, we’re expanding beyond just the competitive aspects of being in athletics, and trying to broaden individuals’ horizons — trying to make them better not just athletically, but better as people, better when they graduate and go on to bigger and better things,” he said.

“When you start talking about sportsmanship, or gender and ethnic diversity, that carries through. We have a vehicle in sport to build on those things. If you’re talking about sportsmanship, you’re really talking about civility — it’s a specific kind of ethic. Ethical behavior carries across; you don’t typically find somebody who is a good sport who turns around and cheats in other things. They’ve learned values through athletics that carry through the rest of their lives.”

—Jack Copeland