PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — It wasn’t all that long ago when the University of Maine at Presque Isle was in the thick of the state’s small-college sports world.
Back then the Owls were part of the Maine Athletic Conference, battling the likes of Husson, Saint Joseph’s and Thomas, the University of Maine at Farmington, UMaine-Machias and the University of New England for national tournament berths.
Most of those schools now compete for NCAA Division III championships, while others have joined other organizations including the United States Collegiate Athletic Association, now home to many of Maine’s smallest college athletic programs.
The evolution of the sport in Maine has meant tough times for some athletic programs far removed from the country’s major transportation corridors but still harboring NCAA tourney ambitions, programs such as UMPI.
The Owls have struggled in recent years to attract opposing teams to their campus for the home games required to establish an identity that’s crucial to attracting the student-athletes who can make the program more viable.
UMPI’s baseball and softball teams, for instance, play virtually all of their games on the road — in part a concession to Aroostook County’s late winters. But even the Owls’ basketball teams play two-thirds of their games on the road these days, according to UMPI athletic director and men’s basketball coach Mike Holmes.
Now UMPI and six other independent small-college programs spanning from Chestnut Hill, Mass., to Oakland, Calif., are uniting with an eye toward becoming eligible to qualify for automatic NCAA Division III tournament berths in a variety of sports.
They will be part of the American Collegiate Athletic Association, which recently received approval from the NCAA Division III Membership Committee to begin official operations effective Sept. 1.
UMPI will be joined in the fledgling league by Alfred State SUNY College of Technology, State University of New York at Canton, Finlandia University of Hancock, Mich.; Mills College of Oakland, Calif.; Pine Manor College of Chestnut Hill, Mass. and the University of Valley Forge of Phoenixville, Pa.
ACAA sports initially will include men’s and women’s cross country, men’s and women’s soccer, women’s volleyball, men’s and women’s basketball and softball.
“Our biggest goal right now has been to get the paperwork into the NCAA on time, which our commissioner did, and get the positive response, which we did,” said Holmes, who helped draft the ACAA’s constitution with Higgins and SUNY Canton athletic director Randy Sieminski.
“We’ve got our party hats on and are celebrating that, and then in the next year we’ll feel our way through some of the conference tournaments and some of the head-to-head scheduling.”
While the primary goal of this conference is to become eligible for automatic NCAA tournament bids — a conference must have at least seven members in a sport to quality — an additional goal for a more remote school like UMPI is to provide additional opportunities for home contests.
“It’s really difficult to get teams to come here to play,” said Holmes. “That was one of our primary motivators, that we’d have a relationship with these schools and get a couple of home games out of the deal and have some other games built in on the road as well as develop some natural rivalries.”
Head-to-head competition among the East Coast schools will be used for seeding teams in conference tournaments, which ultimately will produce champions that will represent the ACAA in NCAA events once the league establishes itself and its tournament formats after at least four years of existence.
But with the East Coast members unlikely to play either Mills College or Finlandia University during the regular season, the conference will employ a different method to seed those schools for ACAA postseason play.
Mills and Finlandia will be seeded based on their standing relative to the other ACAA schools via Hero Sports, an online ratings-based formula that uses all contests played and strength of schedules to rank every team in a given sport nationally.
Such conference marriages of convenience are not unprecedented.
Mills, Finlandia and Pine Manor have been members of the Great South Athletic Conference, an eight-team grouping also including schools from North Carolina, Wisconsin and Georgia that similarly were unified by the pursuit of automatic NCAA tournament bids.
UMPI was part of the GSAC at one time, Holmes said.
“It met its demise when some of its core members got into other conferences,” he said. “It was evaporating, and we were going to get out anyway because it wasn’t cost-feasible for us.
UMPI remains eligible to compete for postseason honors in the USCAA, whose membership also includes other Maine colleges such as UM-Augusta, UM-Fort Kent, UM-Machias, Central Maine Community College of Auburn, Southern Maine Community College of South Portland and Unity College.
“Two years ago we were not strong in anything so to be in the USCAA, which in my opinion is a significant step below the NCAA, that’s where we were in our infancy of this growth process,” said Holmes.
“As our conference matures and comes to fruition we’ll shed that because we need to be thinking beyond that.”
With the support of the D3 Independents Association, the ACAA already has initiated and completed unofficial postseason championships this year in volleyball, men’s and women’s cross country and men’s and women’s soccer. UMPI hosted the soccer tournaments at Scarborough High School in November.
The 2017 ACAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Championships will be held Feb. 25-26 at Alfred State and Pine Manor, respectively.
All sponsored sports will hold official postseason championships starting in 2017-18.
“We are now significantly further ahead than we were a few years ago when we were just wandering around blind and hoping for the best,” said Holmes. “It’s a good moment for us and it’s a huge step forward for what we’re trying to accomplish.
“In a few years we’ll start to get the fruits of this labor.”
