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There are no more area football teams in action, and the other fall high school sports seasons have also come to an end. This probably would have been a great weekend for a long-form feature to gobble up copy space in the real estate afforded us in local print media, but there was actually something worth discussing from earlier this week on the area’s NAIA-affiliated campus, Grace College.
Grace College’s women’s basketball team did the most NAIA thing earlier this week when they set multi-level college women’s basketball records scoring 172 points against Ohio Christian College.
The aforementioned opponent scored 91 points. Imagine scoring 91 points among four 10-minute quarters and losing by 81 points.
If that ain’t some NAIA stuff, I don’t know WHAT is!
This is not a knock on the NAIA. I’ll get to why I was neither shocked nor surprised about this in a little bit.
Grace College competes in the Crossroads League (CL) and must play a set amount of conference contests in a league whose reputation is top tier in the association on a national scale.
CL members Bethel, Goshen Grace, Indiana Wesleyan, Saint Francis (in Fort Wayne), Spring Arbor, and Taylor field some of the most elite teams among the sanctioned NAIA sports with varied success depending on the season and school year.
Some of these schools have an embarrassment of athletic success riches but cannibalize each other in CL play.
The conference where IU South Bend resides considers non-conference frays with the CL as the perfect dose of competitive rigor to toughen themselves up for the Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference (CCAC).
In volleyball, for example, it is not unusual for a team to run the table in their conference but have either a break-even or a notable losing won-loss record in non-conference play.
The CL teams tend to attract more transfers from NCAA Division I and Division II programs because athletes (and we’ve seen this happen in the Times-Union coverage area) have numerous reasons for moving off these NCAA divisions.
Divisions I and II are a grind with extensive travel demands. An athlete playing in the Big Ten will now, throughout the year, be in three of the four time zones a handful of times. Some athletes – in confidence – will tell you reasons like, “if you’re an injured non-starter in A D1 program, you might as well be invisible,” or “I was promised playing time, but realized the staff really needed collateral human bodies for their intense practices,” or the usually-not-said-out-loud “getting to class versus getting to practice is a YOU problem.”
The result? Our area NAIA schools have an impactful amount of NCAA D1 and D2 transfers on their roster. Unlike D3 schools, the NAIA affords its member schools the right to offer partial or full athletic scholarships.
For many of these student-athletes, this is the only way they can stay in school.
NAIA member schools still encourage academic rigor among their base of athletes. Even their schedules around holidays, and finals weeks have wider gaps than D1schools have,
IU South Bend’s men’s basketball program has a 100% graduation rate so valuable to their team philosophy that the students who use up their eligibility strive to stay an additional year to earn a bachelor’s degree even though they’ll never set foot on the hardwood again.
So… the Grace College Lancer’s X-box 172-91 victory is “…some NAIA stuff” because in this association you have these types of circumstances:
The schools with notable amounts of D1 transfers playing among an assortment of NCAA D2 and D3 athletes.
The same fluid transfer portal system to recruit men and women instead of boys and girls to fill each scholastic year’s incidental graduation/transfer gaps.
Upstart and resuscitated colleges (think Trinity Christian College, Calumet College of Saint Joseph in the CCAC) who are closing (TCC), or who are the equivalent of the New Testament’s Lazurus, who returned from a very brief death.
The latter types of schools also include smaller, less robust rosters among teams in less elite NAIA affiliated conferences, but they’re making a foray into college athletics to put more tukuses in their classrooms’ seats.
The CL, on the other hand, is arguably the Midwest’s most stable group of colleges and universities, so athletes transferring among these schools know this will be a stable second (or even third) stanza geared more toward their academic goals.
These other aforementioned schools and the various teams comprising their athletic programs are red meat for the CL, the CCAC, the Wolverine, and other mightier NAIA conferences.
The meat might not have been even redder than it was earlier this week at Grace College’s basketball venue.
