Corona Files: Strange Bedfellows

We've been way out in front of the slow-motion crumbling of the edifice of collegiate athletics since at least last Thursday. Today, we go down a few levels, plumbing the depths of both the NCAA ladder and our readership's patience. Our OBX correspondent will try below to convince you that the Christopher Newport Captains will soon participate in the same league as the University of California Santa Cruz Banana Slugs. I've also asked him to feel free to send my some of that good, good Corolla kush. For medicinal purposes, obviously - still working my way back from these herniated discs.

I’ll try to keep this brief, since it involves small college athletics in my little corner of the world, and you are a diverse and widespread group that likely doesn’t give a blue fig about small college athletics or the school in question. On its face, however, this item pins the bizarre-o-meter.

Christopher Newport University, located in Newport News, Va., successfully competes in Division III athletics as a member of the Capital Athletic Conference. The CAC is a small, regional collection of schools – until Tuesday. The league announced that it will add six schools for the coming year: two in California, one each in Michigan, Wisconsin, New York and Massachusetts.

At a time when colleges are shuttering programs and whacking expenses amid a pandemic, a Division III conference that stretches from Virginia and Maryland to the upper Midwest to California appears batshit crazy.

As usual, there’s more to it. The move is an administrative necessity to preserve NCAA guidelines for  members to earn conference championships and NCAA championship bids. The CAC has been shedding schools for the past couple of years, and will do so again after 2021. If membership falls below a certain number of schools, conferences lose automatic NCAA bids for their champions. Earning NCAA berths becomes far more difficult as an independent or at-large entry in Division III, which has more than 440 colleges nationally and whose tournament fields typically are smaller than in Division I.

Now, logically you still might wonder why Christopher Newport couldn’t simply align with more geographically compatible mates in Virginia, the Land of 1,000 Tuitions. The problem is that nearly all of the Division III schools in Virginia are small and private. Indeed, 80 percent of the nation’s Division III schools are private. Many regional leagues view CNU, with its public status, enrollment of almost 5,000 students, and D3 upper-tier athletic facilities as philosophically incompatible with their schools. They want no part of admitting a school whose standards and emphasis they think, accurately or not, do not match their own and would make them a perennial contender in darn near every sport.

So Christopher Newport had to get creative. There will be no traditional conference regular season schedules, for obvious reasons – distance and cost. CNU will likely play nearby conference schools Mary Washington and Salisbury (Md.) multiple times during the season. There will be limited conference tournaments in most sports, at pre-determined sites. Absent traditional round-robin scheduling, tournament seeding often will be done by computer. Scheduling will be a challenge, because CNU will have to wangle more non-conference opponents who are in the midst of their conference seasons.

It ain’t perfect, but it preserves the athletic department’s competitive aims. And on the plus side, CNU is now in a league with UC Santa Cruz. Can’t be all bad with the Banana Slugs.