The recommendation is subject to approval by the Division III Management Council and ultimately the Division III Presidents Council, which recently asked the championships committee to consider limited “interim” solutions for allowing single-sport conferences to achieve automatic qualification to championships. The Councils could enact the waiver process as noncontroversial legislation to be effective for 2008-09 championships.
The championships committee recommended earlier this year that the Presidents Council sponsor a Convention proposal that would have permitted single-sport conferences with seven or more active members as of February 1, 2008, to receive automatic qualification for championships. The Council, however, decided not to sponsor the proposal, expressing reluctance to create a new opportunity to achieve automatic qualification when a possibility exists that Division III may be restructured.
The proposed waiver process would permit the championships committee to award automatic qualification to a single-sport conference formed before September 2007 and including at least seven active members. The process would permit the committee to waive current legislation, which permits only single-sport conferences that have maintained the same original seven members since February 1998 to receive automatic qualification.
It also would permit the committee to approve a waiver for a single-sport conference that meets one of the following criteria:
· Its members belong to a multi-sport conference that has not sponsored a championship in the particular sport for at least 15 years.
· The conference’s sport is sponsored by 100 or fewer Division III institutions.
· Its members are geographically isolated institutions in multi-sport conferences that do not sponsor the particular sport.
· It sponsors a sport through the first 10 years of the existence in that sport of a Division III championship established after September 2007.
The Management Council will consider the recommendation at its October 22-23 meeting in Indianapolis.
The championships committee also took its first official steps during its September 17-18 meeting in Indianapolis toward establishing a championships budget for the two years beginning in fall 2008.
The committee listed several possible initiatives for the new budget cycle drawn both from its own list of priorities and from recommendations by Division III sports committees, whose chairs met September 17 with the championship committee
A report of the committee’s budget discussions and other championships committee actions will appear in the October 8 issue of The NCAA News.
