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For years NAIA schools aspired to NCAA membership, and Division III (D3) was often viewed as the destination.
Lately, however, there are signs that the traffic may not be flowing entirely in that direction. This week Manchester University announced its move to the NAIA in the 2027-2028 collegiate athletic year.
The school will join a NAIA conference we know quite well in the Times-Union readership area: the Crossroads League (CL).
The CL – in the NAIA universe is among the elite conferences. In the most recent men’s and women’s basketball seasons, the CL earned more than a handful of berths for each gender’s NAIA tournament.
A few examples include Marian University (Indianapolis, IN), the CL champion, who took all the marbles in the postseason women’s tournament. Grace College’s men’s team makes frequent trips to the quarterfinals. Grace College’s soccer sides are considered elite as well.
Will Manchester have some growing pains among most of its sports? I certainly believe it will. It will be interesting to see what caliber of athletes will look toward the Spartans’ 21 athletic programs after the switch.
In the meantime, the university might believe the adjustment – rough as I speculate it will be – will afford its teams opportunities to land the type of athletes they want to move up the food chain and also help increase the enrollment at a very expensive private university.
The NAIA is permitted to offer scholarships to its athletes, and schools will often note in their press releases they are looking forward to a better fit with the NAIA, especially because it, too, has many faith-based institutions.
The Spartans will be the sixth D3 institution to move to the NAIA since 2021. Defiance College (Defiance, Ohio) is the closest institution to make the move (2024), and it, too, competed in Manchester’s current D3 athletic conference.
Are we likely to see more of these moves? The answer, in my view, is yes, in small tranches at first.
The overt reasons for this move are easy to identify.
College presidents and athletic directors will point to enrollment challenges, financial pressures, geography, and institutional fit. Those explanations are legitimate.
Many small private colleges rely heavily on tuition revenue. When you venture farther away from private universities and colleges in the Northeast, the lower the endowments get.
Schools want the flexibility to add roster spots, launch new sports, and recruit aggressively. The NAIA has built much of its recent growth around exactly those opportunities. Since 2020, the association has added dozens of members and has actively targeted NCAA institutions as potential candidates.
Travel costs also matter.
A D3 school preaching amateur ideals all day long learns the hard way when a volleyball team spends six hours on a bus to play a conference match, bracketed numbers eventually appear on their financial reports. Some schools seek a regional NAIA conference to reduce travel and controls expenses.
The overt reasons only tell part of the story. The more interesting discussion involves the motives administrators rarely place in a press release.
One of those is competitive ambition.
Since D3 prohibits athletic scholarships, and the NAIA allows them the reality immediately changes recruiting conversations. A coach trying to attract athletes against neighboring scholarship schools faces an obvious disadvantage. Moving to the NAIA may provide a tool the institution quietly wishes it had all along when meeting in the room where this happens.
Among the many CL and Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference (CCAC) programs in a day-trip radius from our readership area, and the monstrous student loans graduates will need years to pay back, any bit of athletic scholarship money blended with any academic scholarships will facilitate these eventual grads more smoothly into their early careers with having to eat wet cat food.
Another motive is institutional survival.
No president wants to admit that athletics has become a critical enrollment strategy rather than simply an extracurricular activity, but many campuses depend on athlete enrollment to stabilize head counts. If leaders believe NAIA membership helps them recruit 50, 100, or 150 additional students over time, the decision becomes less about athletics and more about making payroll and paying utility bills.
Is this a harbinger that D3 is in trouble on the horizon? Far from it. The division still boasts more than 400 member institutions and continues to attract applicants from other associations.
Simply put, the marketplace has changed.
Many may argue that college athletics should be driven by educational values rather than enrollment goals and financial calculations. Unfortunately, presidents balancing budgets rarely have the luxury of operating in what is fading into the past.
Will we see more D3 departments move to the NAIA? I think we will.
Small colleges’ pressures continue to grow, and the NAIA is presenting itself as an attractive, more flexible alternative at exactly the moment many institutions are searching for options.
In the end, the most important question might not be why schools are leaving D3. It might be, instead, why an increasing number are willing to listen when the NAIA comes calling.
