The eight-member Great Midwest has five football schools, but they compete in separate conferences for football — Urbana and Central State in the Great Lakes Valley Conference, for example.
Urbana will continue to compete in the Great Lakes Valley Conference this season in football and the GMAC in all other sports. In 2013-14, it will compete in the Mountain East in all sports, except lacrosse (Great Lakes Intercollegiate Atheltic Conference) and swimming (Appalachian Swim Conference).
“Over the last two years, the general landscape of Division II athletics has changed daily,” Urbana Athletic Director Doug Young said. “It just became more and more evident that GMAC football wasn’t a logical option for us.”
The Great Midwest did add a sixth football school Monday when Alderson-Broaddus announced its plans to leave the West Virginia Athletic Conference for the Great Midwest. But Young said teams would have still faced the obstacle of finding four non-conference games, and most of the Division II teams in Urbana’s region have only one opening in Week 1.
“You have to somehow manufacture a non-conference schedule,” he said, “and you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist.”
The breakup of the WVIAC led to the formation of the Mountain East. Nine of the WVIAC members announced they were leaving the 88-year-old league in June.
The West Virginia teams joining Urbana, Wise and Notre Dame College (Ohio) in the Mountain East are: the University of Charleston, Concord University, Fairmont State University, Glenville State College, Shepherd University, West Liberty University, West Virginia State University, West Virginia Wesleyan College and Wheeling Jesuit University.
With Urbana and Wise leaving the GMAC, the new conference faces a big challenge at the same time teams are preparing to compete for GMAC championships for the first time. Urbana and Cedarville have competed in the same conference for years, going back to the American Mideast Conference, before both schools shifted from NAIA Division II to NCAA Division II.
“We at Urbana have the highest level of respect for the GMAC schools, especially Cedarville,” Young said. “That part hurts the most, severing the ties with Cedarville. We’ve always been very close.”
Central State, Cedarville and the other remaining GMAC schools (Georgetown, Kentucky Wesleyan, Trevecca Nazarene and women’s only Ursuline) face uncertainty in the new conference, though the addition of Alderson-Broaddus will help.
Cedarville’s athletic director, Dr. Alan Geist, said one option is going after NAIA schools from the south that are rumored to be making the jump to NCAA D-II.
“Two months ago, I came in here on a Monday morning and heard the West Virginia conference was imploding,” Cedarville AD Dr. Alan Geist said. “Life has been goofy since then. … We’re sitting here scratching our heads, trying to figure out what we’re going to do next.”
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