What was the relationship between the NCAA and the NAIA in the 1970s how have that relationship changed?

When it comes to collegiate athletics associations, how do you know which is the best fit for your institution? It comes down to priorities. If your school wants to be nationally competitive at a reasonable price, while driving enrollment and supporting the school’s bottom line, the NAIA is the best association for you.

NAIA schools measure success not just by game scores, but by their financial bottom lines, too. Their NCAA counterparts spend an average of 60 percent more on athletics.

Regardless of their size, all schools are in competition for students. Student-athlete participation at NAIA schools has increased over the last five years. That’s good for the student-athletes and provides vital support and financial stability to our member institutions.

Average athletics
department net return

Average net return
per student-athlete

Average NAIA member sponsors 17 sports, a five-year increase of 25%

Spend 40% less than NCAA counterparts for quality athletic program

Average increase in NAIA student-athlete participation over five years 

65% of athletics departments produce net return of more than $2MM

Rick Brewer, Ph.D.
President, Louisiana Christian University

Finances

Analytics

Drive Enrollment & Retention

Autonomy

Student-Athlete Experience

Eleven Million. That is the price per game that the NCAA charges to broadcast the men’s basketball tournament.

$500. That’s the price per game that the much smaller National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) charges to broadcast their national basketball tournament.

It’s no surprise that NAIA members are jumping ship.

The NAIA has seen a decline in membership since the mid 1970’s; when the NCAA formed its Division-II and Division-III levels of play. The NAIA had 588 members back in 1974. Today, the organization is down 50 percent, to approximately 290 schools. Compare that to the over 1200 members that make up the NCAA today.

The downfall of the NAIA started a domino effect, especially in the northeast, where within two to three years, there may be no NAIA schools left. This trend is forcing some schools to leave the NAIA that never planned on or wanted to in the first place because of a lack of competition. Schools are then either forced to give up athletics, which is almost never an option, or join another athletic organization like the NCAA, at a much higher cost. The move to the NCAA affects budgeting, recruiting, an institutions image, the level of play, the atmosphere at athletic events and the student-athletes themselves.

For decades the NAIA has been an outlet for smaller, mainly faith-based institutions that would rather place and emphasis on character and less on athletics. The NAIA is also a much more affordable alternative, about 45 percent less expensive than NCAA division-II athletics. However, some of the NAIA’s problems stem from this lack of emphasis on athletics.

“You want to make sure your house is strong before you invite people in it,” Lori Thomas, Senior Vice President for Membership and Character Initiatives of the NAIA said.

The “house” Thomas is referring to is the conferences that host the teams in the NAIA. The conferences on the east coast are weak and disappearing. The American Mideast Conference (AMC) is an example of that. The AMC, made up of schools located throughout New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, is seeing an exodus of members this year. Of its 12 members, five from Ohio are leaving this year for the NCAA and another will be leaving the AMC to join a different conference within the NAIA. The movement came as a shock to Dan Berg, head women’s soccer coach and sports information director at Roberts Wesleyan College, a school in the AMC.

“I think it was suppose to be a common agreement there with some of the schools in Ohio that we were all going to stay NAIA, stay to keep the conference strong,” Berg said. “And then the next thing you know it was completely falling apart. All the schools from Ohio were leaving. That kind of left us with no place to go.”

By NAIA regulations, a conference must have a minimum of six members to be recognized and given an automatic post-season bid. After next year, the American Mideast may not even be recognized by the NAIA.

Out of the six schools that will be left in the conference, four have already begun filling out the paper work to apply to the NCAA (Roberts Wesleyan College, Point Park University, Houghton College and Daemen College) and the other two (Carlow University and Wilberforce University) look to stay in the NAIA, though the future of their conference is in question. Thomas says the strength of a conference comes down to the time the staff of that conference can put in.

“We need conference commissioners to not be part of the university staff. We need conference commissioners to be full time,” She said. “If you look at our conference commissioners and their responsibilities and how many other jobs they have, you can start to find a correlation to the strength of the conference.”

Deputy commissioner of the American Mideast Conference Mark Womack, who also serves as Cedarville University’s sports information director, a southwestern Ohio university that is leaving the AMC and NAIA after this season, says that it comes down to geography.

“The NAIA nationally, especially starting in the New England Area, the east coast, it has died out big time,” Womack said. “So that move is slowly trickling west.”

Berg agrees

“This whole area use to be saturated with schools,” Berg said. “So we had teams to play and they kind of transitioned out and now when the Ohio schools left [this year], it kind of left us scrambling even more to find teams to play.”

The only other conference left in the northeast, the Sunrise Conference, has completely dissolved. Only one school in the conference plans to keep the NAIA affiliation. The rest of the schools are jumping to the United States Collegiate Athletic Association (USCAA), an even smaller collegiate athletic organization of around 70 members. The schools are said to be using the USCAA during the upcoming year as a transitional organization as they attempt to gain NCAA membership next year.

Fisher College, the only school in the Sunrise Conference planning to stay in the NAIA, is joining the AMC in the fall. Scott Dulin, director of athletics and baseball coach at Fisher said the move is only temporary, as the school plans to apply to the NCAA next year.

Dulin said the reason why all the schools jumped from the Sunrise Conference was the formation of the NAIA Eligibility Center, which, much like the NCAA Eligibility Center, requires student athletes to register to become eligible for play. The center makes sure that all players are meeting all eligibility requirements.

“That scared the Sunrise Conference members,” Dulin said. “A couple schools are heavy international recruitment and worried that some of that wouldn’t go through properly and they would start seasons without some players.”

Members are scared because the registration now adds more red tape for prospective student athletes and at a cost of $60 per student, $85 for internationals. Many international student-athletes choose NAIA schools to avoid the extra costs and paperwork. Now that the registration costs and paperwork are the same as the NCAA, many international athletes may register only with the NCAA, as it is much better known.

Schools have stuck with the NAIA for years for a number of different reasons. One large reason is that the NAIA has a large emphasis on the character of its student-athletes. The NAIA conducts a Champions of Character program that holds some of the same values that it’s heavily faith-based institutions hold as well.

“There was a lot more schools that were similar to our mission, our fit,” Berg said.

Cost is one of the biggest factors in staying with the NAIA. The NCAA has regulations on jobs coaches and those in the sports department can hold. Berg is an example. Berg coaches and acts as the sports information director. Under NCAA rules Berg cannot be both.

“From my standpoint that’s awesome. I will stick to coaching,” Berg said, leaving the college and athletic department to hire a new sports information director along with other NCAA positions including a NCAA compliance officer. All of which however, will cost the school more money.

Berg said the money doesn’t seem to be as big of an issue as many at the college previously thought, as Daemen College, located just an hour away, could be a possible travel partner, if both are accepted into the NCAA.

“I think with us and Daemen not being far apart all of a sudden you’ve got a travel partner. Schools won’t mind coming in this far to play a team if they know they’re going to get that second game in there as well.”

Yearly dues for both the NCAA and NAIA are both relatively low. NCAA dues range from $900-$1,800, while the NAIA dues are actually more, at around $5,400. The real costs however come at the hiring of full-time NCAA compliance officers, a sports information director and senior women’s sports administrators; along with the large, one-time cost of the application: $25,000.

“I think they [Roberts Wesleyan College] understand it’s an investment,” Berg said. “Even though it seems like quite a bit of money up front.”

There are a number of other differences between the NCAA and the NAIA, mainly having to do with regulations on coaches, universities and their athletes, the NCAA being the much stricter organization, limiting contact with recruits and practice times.

Multiple rules by the NCAA and NAIA can also deter schools from making the jump. By NAIA rule, once a school has been accepted by the NCAA the institution is eligible for only one more year of post-season play in the NAIA. Under NCAA rule any new institution joining the NCAA is put under a three-year probationary period in which they cannot participate in post-season through the NCAA. These rules can heavily affect recruiting for a university.

Roberts Wesleyan believes they will be immune to this impact because of their membership with the National Christian College Athletic Association.  The NCCAA, a group made up of Christian colleges across the United States provides a national tournament every year for all of its members. The organization also allows dual affiliation with the NCAA, NAIA or any other organization, giving post-season play for student-athletes during the transition. Mark Pope, commissioner of the NAIA’s Sun Conference, and once an athletic director at Indiana University Purdue University Fort-Wayne, an NCAA school, thinks otherwise.

“I made the same arguments when I was at IPFW,” Pope said. “That well yeah you don’t have a chance to play in a post-season, but you have the chance to succeed, you have the chance to- I made up the same kind of arguments and, they don’t fly.”

Some student-athletes aren’t as negative.

“Post season play is very important,” Kristina Roberts said, a freshman soccer player at Roberts. “I think we will still have opportunities to play during the post season,” referring to the NCCAA tournament.

Another soccer player at RWC, junior Kara Farnsworth, also believes the transition will be a positive one.

“It’s a little bit better marketing tool to bring student athletes in,” Farnsworth said. “The NAIA isn’t really well known, at least I didn’t know about it when I first went to college.”

Roberts does worry though, that the switch from the heavily Christian NAIA to the NCAA will affect the shape of their games.

“I feel that we will not have the Christian atmosphere at all of our games, like we have,” Roberts said.

Berg says he’s already seen the affects of the transition, as he can market his school as the only Division-II school in the area.

“Within my own sport [women’s soccer] I’ve started to see some of the better players come here because of that switch to [NCAA] Division-II.”

With more and more jumping ship, including his own university, deputy commissioner Womack isn’t giving up on his conference yet.

“It appears the league [American Mideast Conference] will survive at least another year,” Womack said. “Whether it last beyond one more year, I don’t know. If those that are talking about it apply and all get in, that would be impressive. Cause it seems to me like it is very competitive by the year to get into the NCAA.”

Malone University, Walsh University and Ursuline University, three schools leaving the AMC, all had to apply twice before getting accepted into the NCAA. Filling out the application for NCAA membership is not always a guarantee. If schools that are applying to the NCAA from the AMC and the NAIA do not get accepted, it may give Womack and the rest of the conference staff some time to recruit other schools and stabilize the conference.

Those at the NAIA aren’t giving up on the east coast either. With national membership numbers stabilizing in the past five years, Thomas believes the formation of the NAIA eligibility center in September, will boost interest and increase the popularity of the NAIA, contrary to the belief of those in the Sunrise Conference.

“We are actively reaching out and engaging in over 29,000 high schools across the United States,” Thomas said. “This means now that when guidance counselors are sitting down with student-athletes that want to play they can bring out information and say, “Hey, here’s another option for you,” and that’s not happened before.”

Dulin, the A.D. at Fisher College, says that more and more the NAIA changes and tries to become the NCAA, the more it will actually hurt the organization.

“Being NAIA right now makes us unique,” Dulin said. “Believe it or not it’s a selling point when we’re looking for student athletes. We play more games, we have longer seasons. That’s kind of our niche.”

This once “niche” is now all but gone in the northeast and Pope believes it’s gone for all the wrong reasons.

“I worry about all of those schools that are making that decision [to leave the NAIA],” Pope said. “I think they’re making it for the wrong reasons and well I wish them well I fear for their viability going down the road. They’re not ready for Division-II.”