SCIAC Expands!

With my fantasy baseball draft under a week away, I am buried in research for that so let’s have the SCIAC drop big conference news this week! My Latvians actually got hold of this information over the weekend but out of the kindness of my heart and my love of the SCIAC, I held off breaking the story. See, conferences, you can tell me stuff and I won’t (always) publish it.

The big news is that the SCIAC is expanding their membership with the addition of Azusa Pacific University (APU). APU is a private research university in Azusa, California, which sits around 10 miles to the West of La Verne, Pomona and CMS so they are a nice geographical fit. They have around 3700 undergraduates with the same number of postgraduates. APU is a current DII member and plays out of the Pacific West Conference. They transitioned to DII back in in 2012 and were NAIA prior to that move.

The SCIAC have announced that APU will join them starting in 2026. This will give the SCIAC 10 volleyball members, which is both good and bad. Assuming the conference keeps their current conference format of home and home matches, this will effectively remove a playable weekend from the SCIAC schedule. Conference will take up 18 of the allowed 22 dates leaving just two weekends for non-conference. For schools wanting to increase their NCAA Power Index (NPI) and improve their hopes of an NCAA Tournament at-large bid, this is probably not good news. The conference could change up their scheduling and go to divisions or implement a pod schedule for a subset of matches. A pod schedule is where you bring 4 or 5 teams into a single location and each team plays 3 or 4 conference matches over a weekend. It will free up a play day or two at the expense of the home court advantage. (It’s also wonderful for parents/fans to watch more matches but harder on the student athlete physically.) I have heard from a couple of coaches and both expressed concern over the number of conference dates that will be needed with APU coming into the fold. When it comes to NPI, in truth, it’s not so much a big conference or a small conference that helps you, but how good the conference is top to bottom. It’s a catch-22, however, because conference play evens out because half the teams will win and half will lose. You need those non-conference opponents where you increase your NPI (assuming you win) that you then can bring back to the conference to help everyone’s numbers. Less play days means less chance to do this. Couple that with limited travel budgets for most of the schools and I see an issue here. I could see a solution for the power programs where they play double-headers twice during the season (since every location is drivable), which would open up a weekend. The fallout from this expansion will be interesting to follow. (Note – I reached out to the conference on scheduling but didn’t hear back at the time of publishing. I’ll update if I hear more.)

I always thought that UC Santa Cruz would be a natural fit for the SCIAC although they are a very long drive away and, in the past, there were some issues with the viability of keeping athletics there. I definitely don’t see that happening at this point. Increasing to 11 or even 12 teams would mean going to divisions to free up play dates.

I am hearing that Commissioner Jenn Dubow wasn’t happy that the expansion news got out a little early but it all worked out, I think. From a stability move, I think this is a wise decision for the conference. We might see something similar happen with the Northwest Conference as there are a number of non-DIII schools in their area that could transition over. Of course, this all highlights the issues the ASC has with only 4 members going into the 2025 season. This will be the last year they can hold on to their automatic qualifiers without expanding to the minimum number of members.

Welcome to Azusa Pacific! Congratulations to the SCIAC and Comish Jenn.