How NCAA cancellation of fall championships will impact five of CCU’s sports teams
The NCAA on Thursday canceled all Division I championships for the fall season, which impacts five sports at Coastal Carolina University.
Men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s cross country, and women’s volleyball will not be eligible to play for a national championship. The programs still plan on competing this fall, according to a school spokesperson.
Sports including men’s and women’s golf, and men’s and women’s tennis have early seasons in the fall but don’t compete for conference and NCAA championships until the spring.
“At this time, all of our fall sports, consistent with the position of the Sun Belt Conference, are moving forward with their preparations to compete this fall,” CCU assistant athletic director for media relations Kevin Davis said Friday.
NCAA President Mark Emmert said Thursday he’s confident a solution for fall sports can be implemented, but that the highest priority is to the winter and spring sports because they lost their championships earlier this year.
“We cannot now, at this point, have fall NCAA championships, because there’s not enough schools participating,” Emmert said in a video. “The Board of Governors also said, ‘Look, if you don’t have half of the schools playing a sport, you can’t have a legitimate championship.’ So we can’t in any Division I NCAA championship sport, which is everything other than FBS football, that goes on in the fall. Sadly, tragically, that’s going to be the case this fall, full-stop.”
Winter sports including basketball may soon be impacted, as the men’s and women’s basketball schedules generally begin in early November. NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt said this week, “We’ll deliver a March Madness tournament in 2021.”
The CCU football team is not impacted by the NCAA’s decision. It is in the Football Bowl Subdivision, and the FBS postseason is controlled by the College Football Playoff and bowl games rather than the NCAA, which does oversee the Football Championship Subdivision playoffs.
The Sun Belt Conference announced on Aug. 4 that it intends to have an eight-game conference schedule for each member school, including CCU, and allow each team to play up to four non-conference games.
But the Chants have already lost at least three of their four scheduled non-conference games, and several other conferences including the Big 10, Pac-12, Mid-American and Mountain West have all postponed their football seasons with the intention of playing in the spring.
One of the spots might be filled with Big 12 opponent Kansas. The two teams are scheduled play on Sept. 12 in Lawrence, Kansas. Southern Illinois Athletic Director Liz Jarnigan told The Southern Illinoisan that her team was out and CCU was in on Kansas’ schedule.
Kansas was scheduled to play the Chants at Brooks Stadium on Sept. 26, which would have been the first visit to Conway by a team from a Power Five conference.
But the Big 12 is allowing just one non-conference game for its members this season, and it must be at home.
This story was originally published August 14, 2020 at 1:25 PM.
