The inescapable logic of the UAA
How the most geographically-ridiculous conference in Division III sort-of makes sense. At least for Emory.
Some of these observations were sprinkled into other posts, but this is our best shot at something more comprehensive.
A geographic absurdity
After the Coast-to-Coast Conference (which, wait, does that still exist?) the most obviously absurd conference in Division III is the University Athletic Association.
The UAA extends west to St. Louis, north to Rochester, NY, east to Boston, and south to Atlanta. To draw a line connecting its members schools - WashU, Chicago, Case Western, Carnegie Mellon, University of Rochester, Brandeis, NYU and Emory - is to create a seven-sided polygon that sprawls over a perimeter 2,644 miles long (about 200 miles longer than a flight from New York to Los Angeles), encompassing 291,123 square miles, which is basically the size of France and Greece combined.
And from an outsider perspective, it seems silly for many of these teams to be in the UAA. Chicago and Rochester already compete in other conferences for baseball and softball (more on this in a moment). CMU, Case Western, Brandeis, and NYU are all in areas absolutely loaded with colleges and universities, many of which compete at a high level in Division III swimming.
WashU is in a less promising spot. There are a multitude of Division III swim programs within 3-4 hours drive of St. Louis, but aside from Chicago, they aren’t at WashU’s level. Yet, addressing that problem by signing up to compete against teams in Boston, New York and Atlanta seems an odd choice.
And finally, Emory. It's understood that Division III programs are sparse in their region, yet the UAA hardly seems a practical solution. Why can’t they just stop being so Emory about everything, and join the SAA1 or SCAC2 and swim some regional D3 programs for a change?3
For Kenyon, an average drive of 120 miles
Please permit a digression, the relevance of which should soon be clear.
Imagine you have the good fortune to swim at Kenyon College.4 Your conference is the North Coast Athletic Conference (NCAC). The NCAC is not particularly small. It spans two fairly large states. But here is how the geography of conference competition looks for Kenyon.
Starting at Kenyon, you have three conference opponents within 50 miles.5
Two more conference opponents are within 100 miles.6
The furthest opponent in Ohio is Hiram, which is a 125 mile drive on interstates.
Your two most far-flung opponents are in Indiana. Depauw is about 278 miles away and Wabash is 280 miles away. On I-70, it is doable in under 5 hours. They are also right next to each other (the campuses are separated by less than 30 miles).
For Kenyon, 6 of 8 conference opponents are fewer than 125 miles away. If Kenyon were to drive to each conference opponent in serial order, returning to Gambier each time, the average outward drive would be 120 miles.
Overall, for the eight teams in the NCAC, there are 17 discrete routes between conference opponents that are each less than 125 miles.7
So why doesn’t Emory join a Division III conference closer to home? Some speculation, in two parts.
Part 1: Do conferences matter in swimming?
Part of the answer is that conferences, in Division III swimming, just don’t matter that much.
Conferences do matter in some Division III sports. In baseball, for example, 41 conferences8 hold an automatic postseason bid (and the UAA is not one of them). For most teams9 success in the conference tournament determines whether they have a post-season. In the regular season, conferences schedule conference games. Off-days may accommodate non-conference games, but conference games must be played. So the proximity and program quality of conference opponents really does matter.10
In swimming, individual swimmers and relay teams qualify for Nationals independent of the fortunes of the larger team. And you don’t have to participate in dual meets against conference opponents unless you want to.
I can find no record of Emory hosting, or participating in, a dual meet against a UAA opponent over the past 12 seasons.
Over that same period of time Emory swam in at least 11 dual meets against SAA opponents - Birmingham-Southern, Centre, and Sewanee.
In swimming there is nothing sacred, or even weighted, about conference competition. And when you see something like Kenyon’s schedule for this coming weekend - a meet at Ohio Wesleyan on Friday night and at Denison on Saturday morning - it is worth considering that Kenyon may have chosen those two opponents because they are right there (less than 50 miles away) not because of any need to establish a favorable dual meet record against in-conference opponents.
Part 2: Which conference did you have in mind?
The nearest Division III conference with swimming is the Southern Athletic Association. There is some quality swimming in the SAA. At Nationals last year, Birmingham Southern, Centre, Rhodes and Millsaps were all point-scoring teams. None of the teams in the SAA are perennial top 25 teams, and obviously Emory would dominate the conference, but competition isn’t the only issue. Take a look at this table:
Those numbers represent highway miles. The average travel distances for each team does NOT include Emory, but I added a line with Emory’s hypothetical travel distances to illustrate the point.
Teams in the SAA are separated by ungodly distances.
Remember the earlier remark that in the NCAC there were 17 discrete routes between conference opponents of less than 125 miles?11 If you look through all the trips by every team in the SAA conference, you find two trips of 125 miles or less. Again using Kenyon as the example, Kenyon’s average conference trip is 120 miles. BSC has the shortest average SAA conference trip at 257 miles, well more than twice as far to travel on an average trip. Kenyon’s worst trip is 280 miles.12 Centre College has two trips over 560 miles long.13
So the SAA can’t match the UAA’s competition level or the NCAC’s cozy travel times. And Emory does swim some SAA opponents. They just do it when they feel like it.
Wait, where’s Trinity?
Now you might have noticed something missing. Trinity (TX) is a very good D3 squad, last year ranked 17th on the Women’s side and 26th on the Men’s. But they are not in the SAA, at least not for swimming.14
They are in the SCAC, along with their neighbors at Southwestern,15 St. Thomas (Houston), Austin (north of Dallas), McMurry (Abilene), Centenary (Shreveport, LA), the University of the Ozarks (Clarksville, AR), and Colorado College in Colorado Springs, a tidy 851 miles from the campus of Trinity in San Antonio.
The point is that the SCAC is even more spread out than the SAA.
The perimeter of the NCAC (the purple line) is 701 miles.
The perimeter of the SAA is 1,283 miles.16
The perimeter of the SCAC is 2,211 miles.
Adding Emory to the SCAC would expand the perimeter of the SCAC to 3,268 miles long, significantly more than the UAA is right now.
And, right now at least, it is only by joining the SCAC, not the SAA, that Emory could count on facing even a single conference opponent regularly in the top 25 of Division III teams.
Neither the SAA or SCAC can offer the proximity found in the NCAC, and especially not the neighborhood feel of the SCIAC, Centennial, or MIAC.17
And no conference has a better conference championship meet than the UAA. That is a marquee event because there Emory faces Chicago, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western and WashU who are regular top 25 teams.18
For Emory at least, compared to the alternatives, the UAA is a pretty good deal.
Southern Athletic Association: Division III swim programs include Rhodes, Centre, Berry, Sewanee, Birmingham-Southern (BSC), Hendrix, and Millsaps.
Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference: Trinity, Colorado, College, Southwestern, Centenary, McMurry, Ozarks, Saint Thomas (TX), Austin.
You might ask, can teams just leave their conference and go somewhere else?
Sure. Even bracketing the craziness about Stanford and Cal swimming in the Atlantic Coast Conference (which was driven by revenue producing sports and television rights negotiations), Division III teams do switch conferences. And sometimes programs will stay with a conference but will opt-out in certain sports. For instance, Rochester does not play baseball in the UAA, they play in the Liberty League. And Chicago plays baseball in the Midwest Conference.
Outside the UAA, examples abound. Johns Hopkins is in the Centennial for baseball, is independent in swimming, and both Men’s and Women’s lacrosse competes in the Big Ten (a powerhouse D1 conference). Franklin & Marshall swims in the Centennial, but F&M Men’s Wrestling competes in the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association, a conference that includes teams that also compete in the Ivy League and Patriot League. Colorado College, Clarkson, RIT, RPI, St. Lawrence, and Union all play ice hockey out of conference.
Just going to keep my smart comments to myself for now.
Kenyon College to Denison University: approximately 28 miles. Kenyon College to Ohio Wesleyan University: approximately 40 miles. Kenyon College to College of Wooster: approximately 42 miles.
Oberlin about 70 miles away, and Wittenberg is 97 miles away.
In the 2022-23 season.
Salisbury is the most obvious exception here.
This is part of the reason Rochester and Chicago choose to play baseball and softball in conferences with an automatic bid and competition closer to home.
If you think I cherry-picked a special case, then I mean, yeh sort of, but look at the Centennial Conference, or the NESCAC, or the SCIAC, or the NJAC. For a lot of schools, conference competition means fairly local competition.
And, at least on the swim side, they never do it. The last time Kenyon swim traveled to face Depauw or Wabash in a dual meet in Indiana was…never? I only looked back to 2011 but I did not see any indication that Kenyon makes that trip.
But this season, for example, Rhodes goes to Millsaps, Hendrix, and Sewanee. Centre travels to BSC, Sewanee, and Berry.
And keep in mind, every time we say Kenyon we might have just as easily said ‘Denison’ or even ‘Wooster’ or ‘Ohio Wesleyan’.
They do play football in the SAA and I don’t pretend to understand how these decisions get made.
Georgetown, TX, outside Austin and home to the fledgling Two-Step Inn music festival that had quite the line-up last year.
Adding Emory to the SAA would be a rough deal for a number of SAA teams. For Rhodes, Hendrix and Millsaps, adding Emory would add one more trip that exceeds their already preposterous average travel distance. For Centre it adds a 367 mile trip to their already dismal average trip length of 405 miles. It technically brings down their average, but in a practical sense it is one more unmanageably long trip.
As you have already intuited, these teams don’t actually swim each other that much. They spend a lot of time swimming other teams in their local area.
The fact that these teams are even in a conference - at all - might be driven by the needs of other sports, where post-season bids are done on the team - not individual - level. Most D3 conferences in, say, baseball have an automatic bid to the post-season for the conference winner. If you are not playing in a conference with an automatic bid, or not in a conference at all, then you need to get an at-large bid to the post-season, which is a highly uncertain and difficult process.
The perimeter of the SCIAC is the smallest of the major conferences, stretching just 218 miles. The perimeter of the MIAC covers just 253 miles. The Centennial has a perimeter just 281 miles long.
Plus the UAA features the occasional standout from lower ranked teams, like Sam Dienstag.