The NCAA will retain its 35-year-old three-division structure for at least the foreseeable future, though division-specific discussions about ways to deal with membership growth are certain to continue.

The NCAA Executive Committee will be informed April 24 that a working group it created last year to study restructuring has halted its work. The same goes for a Division III working group that suggested creating a new division or subdividing Division III to respond to a continuing influx of smaller schools into the NCAA, as reported in the winter 2008 issue of Champion.

A survey of the Division III membership – following on the heels of opposition voiced at January’s NCAA Convention about the Division III working group’s suggestion – revealed scant support in the Association’s largest division for restructuring as an option. Nearly 350 of the division’s active and provisional member schools, more than 80 percent, supported maintaining Division III as it currently exists. Most of the respondents selected “strongly support” from possible answers in the survey while only about 15 percent (about 60 schools) supported creating a new division or subdivision.

However, even as it halted its work, Division III’s working group expressed concern that continued growth will make it increasingly difficult to maintain current levels of championships access and national office services and will aggravate differences among Division III schools on such questions as minimum sports sponsorship, “redshirting,” appropriate membership standards and competitive restrictions.

“If Division III is to move forward without structural change to accommodate its projected growth” – research indicates it will grow to 480 members by 2020 – “it must address several growth-related issues, as well as related policy issues,” the group stated in its final report.

Those issues likely will be the primary focus of “Town Hall Meetings” that Division III will conduct May 8 in Indianapolis, May 19 in Boston and June 2 in San Antonio. Those sessions could produce new ideas for Division III’s governance structure to consider.

Meanwhile, there are hopes that the Association-wide effort sponsored by the Executive Committee to address growth and other membership issues will live on, even as the working group that focused on restructuring as a solution ceases operations.

Many issues remain. Division I also faces continuing growth in its ranks, though it temporarily has halted an influx of new members (mostly schools moving from Division II) through a moratorium on accepting applications it enacted last summer to permit a re-evaluation of membership standards. Division II schools, though seemingly satisfied with a recent initiative to better define their role in intercollegiate athletics, remain concerned about how schools seeking future membership in that classification might further affect the division’s identity.

One key figure in the recent round of discussion of membership issues, former Division II Presidents Council Chair Charles Ambrose, suggested that the Executive Committee’s working group led the way toward dealing with such problems in the future, even as it stepped away from the path toward restructuring.

“Our work together here made clear our intent (in all three divisions) to work together in addressing membership issues,” he said.

Talks about membership structure were at the forefront of Division III’s agenda at the January Convention in Nashville. / Trevor Brown Jr., NCAA Photos