College Shuffle

In case you are new to the volleyball offseason, most stories coming out during this time aren’t good. For today, we’ve got two stories dealing with colleges/conferences. The first is the announcement that the CSAC and the United East are going to merge. “Merge” is an interesting word because it often means taking two pieces, putting them together and creating a larger (new) single piece. In the case of the NCAA, merging could mean that in the case of the automatic qualifiers (AQ) that both conferences will lose them. That’s why I would have expected one of the conferences to absorb the other and that’s probably what will happen. This will mean that one of the conferences will retain their AQ. We saw this recently with the formation of the C2C Conference. There isn’t a lot of detail in the announcement but the “merge” is scheduled to take place in time for the fall season next year (2023). The United East was going to drop to 7 members in volleyball next year. The CSAC is currently at 10 volleyball members so this will become a rather large conference for our sport.

Speaking of the AQ, the NECC will lose theirs this year as they have dropped below the minimum number required. As of now, I think there is only one school (Eastern Nazarene) that hasn’t announced their conference plans for next year. We had 44 Pool A bids (or AQ) this past year. Both of these outcomes would mean we would be at 42 next year with one Pool B (independent schools) bid. If that holds up, we would have 21 Pool C (at-large) bids next year, which would be the largest number since I can remember and it might be the largest ever.

Our other story deals with Birmingham-Southern College (BSC). This article describes the “financial distress” the institution is suffering from and is in danger of closing in 2023. The president of the school is requesting $37.5 million in public money for the private school. This would ensure the college remains until 2026 with the goal of private fundraising taking over in order to keep the school viable after that point.

There are a number of schools at all levels suffering from a drop of enrollment and endowment money so more closures could be discussed in the coming months. Like I said, not a good time for stories to come out for colleges.