Now that Division II has adopted legislation to facilitate membership from Canadian institutions, the Division II Membership Committee has discovered a potential hurdle that American institutions take for granted: accreditation.

NCAA Constitution 3.2.1.1 requires NCAA members to be accredited by a recognized U.S. regional agency. The problem is that Canadian schools don’t face those requirements, and not all U.S. regional accrediting agencies take on international institutions (though some have begun doing so).

The Membership Committee at its most recent meeting noted that going through an accreditation process may not be a deal-breaker for Canadian institutions committed to seeking Division II membership, but it may add a few years to the process. When Division II first considered enticing Canadian schools to join its ranks, the thought was that schools prepared to do so could go through the normal membership process in as little as three years (one exploratory year and two provisional). But most accreditations take five to seven years to complete.

While delaying the process isn’t necessarily happy news, the Membership Committee wasn’t about to compromise the bedrock ideal of accreditation just to accelerate the membership process.

Committee Vice Chair Glenn Stokes, the faculty athletics representative at Columbus State, said the group agreed on the following benchmarks for prospective Canadian institutions to meet as they progress through the system:

1. Before being accepted into year one of exploratory membership for Division II, Canadian schools must demonstrate in writing that they have applied to begin accreditation.

2. An institution must have achieved “candidacy status” for accreditation before entering into the provisional stage of Division II membership.

3. Institutions must be fully accredited before being considered for active Division II membership.

“It is important that the membership process be the same for all prospective Division II members,” Stokes said. He said membership also isn’t just an athletics issue. The NCAA is a higher-education association, so it makes sense for it to require the accreditation piece to stress that Division II membership is a campus-wide endeavor, Stokes said.

“We want to help schools that want to participate get into the process and compete,” he said. “They are in a geographic area in which Division II needs more competition, so we recommended that this legislation go through and we’re anxious to see it come to fruition. But we realized that accreditation had to be a significant part of the process.”

Committee members also discussed other logistics associated with international schools joining Division II. For example, the committee asked that a current interpretation regarding the ability for an institution to purchase passports or visas for student-athletes to travel across the border be incorporated as permissive legislation into the Division II Manual.

Members also considered how the exchange rate on the dollar would affect how Canadian schools comply with minimum financial aid requirements in Division II. For example, if a Canadian institution budgets the minimum $250,000 in athletics grants to meet compliance criteria, what happens when halfway through the year the exchange rate changes and the dollar amount is more or less than originally valued?

“Right now we assess compliance at the end of the fiscal year in August, but that may be too late – when you factor in the exchange rate – to accommodate what the institution has budgeted at the beginning of the year,” Stokes said. For now, the committee is recommending a “running tally” every time an institution makes a payment to its financial aid commitment, but Stokes said even that plan could result in a number of waiver requests by the end of the year. At the very least, the committee determined that the system would be based on U.S. dollars, not Canadian currency.

The Membership Committee will continue to work on the details of Canadian membership (it next meets in July), but prospective Canadian institutions will be notified of the accreditation discussion right away. Stokes noted the June 1 application deadline to enter the membership process, but he said it’s more likely that the earliest a Canadian institution would be prepared to apply is June 1, 2009.

Committee Vice Chair Glenn Stokes at the Division II Issues Forum at the 2008 NCAA Convention in Nashville. / Trevor Brown Jr., NCAA Photos.