Love Out Loud 5

Little Things Matter

All athletes were given Wednesday as their NCAA-mandated one off day of the week, as the coaches collectively felt it better to have their charges occupied tomorrow and thus away from the ruckus of freshmen and non-Fall athletes moving into the residence halls. As a result of that, Marc and Jill Logan were able to meet and begin working on her Midwest Field Hockey Conference idea.

Marc: I did a bit of research last night on comparable situations involving emerging sports to get a better grasp for the long-term success of your proposal. First, what does the landscape look like from your perspective for the sport in this part of the country?

Jill: Right now, we're the only school in the NACC that sponsors the sport. Additionally, one could argue we're the furthest west of any NCAA member which plays field hockey. St. Norbert is fairly well isolated when it comes to getting non-conference matches since they have to travel four hours just to get to the point where they're on equal footing geographically with Lake Forest. Trine, being on the eastern side of Indiana, is relatively close to a good number of the schools in the North Coast Athletic Conference and can play a 16-match independent schedule, whereas those of us in the NACC and Midwest conferences would have to do immense traveling to mirror that, as we had become accustomed with our previous conference affiliation. As it is, we're only playing 10 matches this year, eight of which are home-and-homes and one a neutral-site encounter at Trine with an NCAC school.

Marc: So two Midwest, one NACC, and one MIAA school so far as potential members of what we'll call the Midwest Field Hockey Conference, or MFHC. From a structure standpoint, you don't want to have too many from any one of those conferences in the initial six, as it would likely lead to quick expansion and an eventual breakaway once an all-sports conference had sufficient numbers to sponsor the sport under its own flag. You also don't want to just absorb everyone interested in playing, like the MWLC (Midwest Women's Lacrosse Conference) did, because it creates an unwieldy league schedule with 12 or 13 of your 16 matches within the conference, thus making it difficult for conference members to compete for an at-large bid into the NCAA tournament.

Jill: Jamie said you were the only person connected to the athletic department, and perhaps the university as a whole, who knew the Division III conferences in the Great Lakes region well enough to offer decent advice on what to seek from potential new members and which ones might make the best fit alongside the current ones. So where do we start?

Marc: I think first you want to identify what each of the inaugural four bring to the table as institutions and field hockey programs, then drill down into their likely recruiting bases. From there, it'd be about selecting potential members that fit the current "tone" of the prospective league.

Jill: We're the longest-standing of those first four members, with Gavin's predecessor being the impetus to starting the sport here, for what reason or reasons I'm not aware. Because of that, we've had everything north and west of Indianapolis as our pool of future players. Not sure how much I can tell you about the other three.

Marc: Hence why Jamie offered my services to you. Let's start with Trine. They have long been an engineering school, like MSOE, and probably added the sport to lure more female students to campus. Their location, as you said, puts them in close proximity to a number of possible opponents, which also would mean they'd be recruiting against one another for student-athletes. Lake Forest is competitive in pretty much every sport they sponsor and are likely to scoop up players from the small, private, "wealthy" schools in the greater Chicago area and elsewhere. St. Norbert is similar to Lake Forest in its sponsorship of athletics, but it plays up its Catholic tradition on the recruiting trail to stock their teams. I had a few soccer players from the school on my Women's Premier League teams, including TLU's current Director of Human Resources, thus why I know about some of the internal dynamics of their athletic department.