(03-17-2021 01:11 AM)Todor Wrote:  

(03-16-2021 01:34 PM)teamvsn Wrote:  

(03-16-2021 02:32 AM)Todor Wrote:  I would expect Ozarks to drop all of the sports they were basically forced to add in the NAIA as well. Volleyball, Men's and Women's Basketball, Baseball. That is all they had offered for many years until pressure to add as many sports as possible took over.

Golf, track, and maybe cross country are probably gone. They don't need sports to recruit, and barring conference requirements/pressure to add sports, they are probably happier with their past offerings.

How did a conference force them to add sports? They were a member of the MCAC for about 20 years, and that conference didn't have an excessive number of sports. They haven't been a member of any conference since 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midlands_C...er_schools

Don't NAIA conferences have to have a certain number of sports sponsored? Without Ozarks and Bellevue each adding golf and cross country at about the same time, the MCAC only had 3 sports for men. I'm sure the members with golf and cross country wanted to keep the conference auto bid for those sports, and if you don't have 6 teams competing, I'm sure the naia wouldn't keep awarding the bits to them.

So yeah, the MCAC didn't offer excessive sports, and that was becoming an issue.

I don't know the specifics of the MCAC but it's unusual for conferences to require members to support specific sports, except sometimes for high profile sports like football or men's basketball. In fact, the NAIA itself has a long history of having no requirements... for years, schools could sponsor just men's basketball, and then when Title IX came around they added women's volleyball or basketball. That changed around 5 or 10 years ago and there are minimum requirements.

About the same time that happened, the NAIA started encouraging associate conference memberships in ALL sports (previously only allowing it for football) so uneven sport sponsorships really hasn't been a problem lately. This was all around the time the MCAC collapsed, so I really don't think that had anything to do with it. But I don't know for sure.

Here's an archived copy of the MCAC web site. If you click on the Sports menu you can see what they offered.

https://web.archive.org/web/201804170952...-naia.org/