Jun 25, 2010 8:30:57 AM

The Division III Membership Committee is recommending active status for five institutions that successfully completed all four years of the Division III provisional membership process.

If approved by the Division III Management Council next month, the following schools will begin active status in Division III on September 1:

• Lancaster Bible College (Lancaster, Pennsylvania)
• Lyndon State College (Lyndonville, Vermont)
• North Central University (Minnesota) (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
• Penn State Harrisburg (Middletown, Pennsylvania)
• Saint Vincent College (Latrobe, Pennsylvania)

These additions, plus other anticipated movement before September 1, would bring total active Division III membership to 434 institutions.

Meeting June 22-23 in Indianapolis, the Division III Membership Committee also agreed to move the following four institutions to the final year of provisional membership:

• Franciscan University Steubenville (Steubenville, Ohio)
• Geneva College (Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania)
• St. Joseph's College (Brooklyn, New York)
• Birmingham-Southern College (Birmingham, Alabama)

If those institutions successfully complete year four of the provisional/reclassifying process, they could be accepted as active Division III members for the 2011-12 academic year.

The Membership Committee also approved other advancement in the provisional/reclassifying track.

From Year 2 to Year 3 (on track to achieve active membership in 2012-13)

• Spalding University (Louisville, Kentucky)
• State University of New York at Cobleskill (Cobleskill, New York)

From Year 1 to Year 2 (on track to achieve active membership in 2013-14)

• Berry College (Mount Berry, Georgia)
• Covenant College (Lookout Mountain, Georgia)
• Penn State Abington (Abington, Pennsylvania)

The committee also considered applications from several schools asking to begin the Division III membership process and made recommendations that the Management Council will consider at its July 19-20 meeting.

Membership and conference requirements

In addition to membership decisions, the committee also reviewed the penalty structure currently applied for institutions that violate membership requirements, which include compliance with sports-sponsorship requirements, completion of the Institutional Self-Study Guide once every five years, and attendance requirements for the NCAA Convention (annually) and Regional Rules Seminars (once every three years).

The division had planned to apply the penalty structure to all requirements collectively but discussed instead whether sports-sponsorship violations should be separate from others, given the importance of that prong and nature of the other requirements. As a result, the committee is asking the Management Council to sponsor legislation that would create a separate five-year probationary condition for violations of sports sponsorship that is mutually exclusive of the three-year probationary periods for violations in the other membership requirements.

Under that legislative model, an institution that violates sports-sponsorship requirements would trigger the five-year probationary period, during which violation of any other membership requirement would result in restricted membership. Violations of the non-sports-sponsorship components of membership requirements would continue to incur three years of probation, during which a "second strike" of the same violation would trigger restricted membership.

Two other action items emerged from reviewing a Division III Championships Committee suggestion to consider changing the definition of "core" for the purposes of conference eligibility for automatic qualification to championships.

The Championships Committee at its June 21-22 meeting agreed to ask the Management Council for feedback on a concept that would limit institutions to be core members of only one conference. The concept would change the current definition of "core" to preclude the new formation of so-called "umbrella" conferences that have an overarching conference with two sub-conferences in which schools are core in both the umbrella conference and the sub-conference.

The Membership Committee also agreed with the Championships Committee's assessment that the minimum number of schools required to meet standards for conference membership should be increased from the current six to seven. Both committees note that there currently are no six-member conferences in Division III and that the increase to seven would align with requiring seven for the purposes of automatic qualification.

The Membership Committee agreed to ask the Management Council to sponsor legislation along those lines with a delayed effective date to give prospective leagues that might be considering application time to align with the enhanced standard.

Other highlights

In other action at the Membership Committee's June 22-23 meeting, members:

• Per a referral from the NCAA Executive Committee, the Division III Membership Committee did not support affording membership to institutions not accredited by one of the six regional accreditation agencies but recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.
• Supported in concept a national office initiative to consider eliminating the "corresponding membership" category and enhance the "affiliated membership" category (make it available only to coaches and sports associations for sports sponsored by the NCAA, and associations composed of college/university administrators) to better regulate outside groups and organizations that seek NCAA affiliation simply to use NCAA marks.