The Division III Presidents Council demonstrated a desire during its November meeting to avoid writing new legislation when there are other ways of dealing with problems impacting only a portion of the membership.
As a result, conferences that compete for a championship in a single sport can expect relief from an existing bylaw that in a couple of cases threatened to result in a loss of automatic qualification, while leagues unable due to weather or other circumstances to finish a championship game or a contest to decide an NCAA tournament qualifier also will receive more leeway to slightly extend the regular playing season – both thanks to waiver processes.
Both actions came in response by the Council to legislative proposals sponsored by member conferences for consideration at the 2008 Convention.
The Council’s action involving single-sport conferences resulted in withdrawal by the North Atlantic and Massachusetts State Collegiate Athletic Conferences of a proposal to permit any single-sport conferences formed before February 1, 2007, to receive automatic qualification, provided they maintain a membership of seven active members (rather than “original” members as specified in current legislation).
The Council achieved the same result by empowering the Division III Championships Committee to grant waivers for the purpose of treating existing single-sport conferences similarly to multi-sport conferences for championships purposes.
Council members actually headed off new legislation dealing with the issue from within the governance structure itself earlier in 2007. It sent the Championships Committee back to the drawing board after that panel recommended new legislation that not only would deal with the problem targeted by the conferences’ proposal, but also cover other situations involving single-sport conferences’ eligibility for automatic qualification.
The Council sent the proposal back to the committee because it would have opened a window until February 2008 for creating new single-sport conferences that would be eligible for automatic qualification to championships. The Council asked the committee to consider solutions that would not result in the creation of new conferences during a time when Division III and the Association’s other two divisions are studying the possibility of restructuring.
The committee responded with the suggestion of treating single-sport conferences through the waiver process rather than legislation.
In empowering the committee with the waiver option, the Council gave its blessing to a means of broadly treating single-sport conferences in the same manner as multi-sport leagues.
The committee now also has the authority to grant waivers in these situations:
• When a single-sport conference’s members belong to a multi-sport conference that has not sponsored a championship in the particular sport for at least 15 years.
• When the conference’s sport is sponsored by 100 or fewer Division III institutions.
• When a conference’s members are geographically isolated institutions that belong to multi-sport conferences that do not sponsor the particular sport.
• When, for championships established after September 2007, a conference sponsors that sport through the first 10 years of the championship’s existence.
As for the effort to legislatively permit a slight extension of the playing season to “make up” a decisive conference game delayed by weather or other “extraordinary” circumstances, the Council responded not only by opposing that proposal, but also by encouraging use of an existing waiver process for dealing with such situations.
The proposal by the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic and Northern Athletics Conferences remains on the Convention agenda, but the Council hopes its action to more broadly authorize the Division III Administrative Review Subcommittee and NCAA staff to consider and grant the waivers will discourage a vote to add another legislated exception for a small segment of the membership to the Division III Manual.