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New Division III men’s volleyball conference formed

Gary Williams, associate athletics director of Carthage College, has been appointed commissioner of the new Continental Volleyball Conference, a national men’s volleyball conference with 10 NCAA Division III institutions that will begin competition in 2012.

The CVC will consist of Carthage (Kenosha, Wis.), Eastern Mennonite (Harrisonburg, Va.), Fontbonne (St. Louis) Juniata (Huntingdon, Pa.), Milwaukee School of Engineering (Milwaukee), Mount St. Joseph (Cincinnati), Philadelphia Biblical (Langhorne, Pa.) Stevenson (Stevenson, Md.), Thiel (Greenville, Pa.) and UC Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, Calif.).

Division III formally adopted the NCAA men’s volleyball championship as the Association’s 89th championship at the 2011 Convention held this past January. The NCAA has sponsored a National Collegiate Volleyball Championship since 1970, which was open to any varsity collegiate program in all three divisions. With the recent exponential growth of the sport on the Division III level, the NCAA has added the Division III championship. This adoption and the awarding of an automatic-qualifier bid to the tournament was the catalyst to forming the CVC, Williams said.

The teams in the conference, although varied in location, include five of the 10 teams that have been ranked consistently among the top 15 teams in Division III. The conference will begin competition in 2012, consisting of the following divisions:

East

• Eastern Mennonite
• Juniata
• Philadelphia Biblical
• Stevenson
• Thiel

West

• Carthage
• Fontbonne
• Milwaukee School of Engineering
• Mount St. Joseph
• UC Santa Cruz

Each team will play divisional opponents twice and the top teams from each division advance to the conference tournament. The CVC conference tournament champion will receive an automatic bid into the first NCAA Division III tournament to be held at Springfield College on April 27-29, 2012.

“The conference’s focus is to create a league that will provide nationally recognized and competitive opportunities for our member institutions, while remaining fiscally sound and reducing missed class time, enhancing the overall student-athlete experience,” said Williams. “We are committed to providing a high-quality volleyball experience from coast to coast, while maintaining the integrity of our student’s personal and academic lives and fulfilling the mission of an integrated student-athlete experience that is a staple of the Division III philosophy.”

Williams believes that the strength of the conference is its diversity of institutions and the ability to inspire future growth in men’s volleyball throughout the nation.

“The CVC also affords schools geographically separate from most of Division III men’s volleyball schools to create a league that will encourage future expansion and growth of programs in the Midwest and West regions of the country, while at the same time providing a stable conference structure for schools that were not included in conference realignments before and just after the NCAA vote.

“Through our research of geographically diverse conferences such as the University Athletic Association and other single-sport models in men’s and women’s lacrosse, we created a structure that will meet our goals and provide a competitive, yet sound playing schedule.”