ACAA & CAC Merge

The Capital Athletic Conference (CAC) and the American Collegiate Athletic Conference (ACAA) have announced that they will merge effective June 15, 2020. You can find the CAC announcement, here. You can find the ACAA announcement, here.

Mills College and UC Santa Cruz are members of the ACAA, which was going down to six full-time members. The CAC was struggling even more (although they had an automatic qualifier) as they were going down to 5 teams. That makes 11 teams for the 2020-2021 season but more teams will be leaving in 2021, which will drop the new conference down to 8 teams. Please read the announcements for the full list of teams and the upcoming defections.

The ACAA was created from a number of former independent schools but did not yet have an automatic qualifier bid (Pool A). There was some serious doubt they would ever obtain one because their members didn’t play a regular season and the NCAA was moving towards requiring this to be eligible for a Pool A bid. The CAC had dropped below the minimum teams needed to retain their Pool A bid and needed to do something prior to next year when they would have lost it.

Based on the announcements, it does not appear that the new CAC-ACAA will play a regular season schedule so it will be interesting to see how the NCAA handles this new conference. I expect the NCAA to continue to push back on this type of arrangement. Most of the teams play in the Northeast so a regular season could be done. The issue will be Finlandia (Michigan) and the two California teams (Mills College and UCSC). One problem at a time would be the approach I figure they are going with but they really do need at least two of those three teams to stay in order to keep the Pool A bid.

The announcements explain that for 2020, the CAC will still play a regular season and the top 4 teams will advance to the conference tournament. The ACAA will also qualify two teams based on the Massey Ratings. Massey Ratings will also be used to seed the six teams in the tournament. Starting in 2021, qualification (I assume) and seeding will strictly be done on Massey Ratings.

For those not familiar with the CAC, they will retain Christopher Newport, Mary Washington and Salisbury starting in 2021 and all three are strong respectable volleyball programs.

One big fallout from this merger is that it seems like for this year there will be no Pool B bid, which goes to the best independent team in the nation. With the Atlantic East Conference being eligible for a Pool A bid that removes 7 previously independent teams in addition to the 6 from the ACAA. I’m quite sure I’m wrong but I think that would leave only Maranatha Baptist and Trinity (D.C.) as the only true DIII volleyball independent teams this season.

Pretending for a second that we’ll have a normal volleyball season in 2020, this would mean 44 Pool A bids and 20 Pool C (at-large) bids. The two independent teams would be eligible for an at-large bid. If I’m right then this is a big win for the programs that needing at-large bids.

With respect to Mills College and UCSC, this gives them a solid path to the NCAA Tournament and that’s a really big deal. On the flip side, UCSC may have had a better chance at the Pool B bid this year then they will getting by the CAC teams. I still think UCSC future is in the SCIAC but my understanding the last time I checked is that there was too much uncertainty around UCSC and staying in DIII. Heck, there was uncertainty at the time about retaining the volleyball program all together.

With respect to the new conference, I have to wait to see how the NCAA responds to this with any changes to the championship qualifications. It’s also not out of the question that one or two of the remaining CAC teams jump ship (like everyone else has done). Still, in these uncertain times, it’s nice that someone seems to have a few answers about something.