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The Atlantic Sun will look a little different next season for Stetson.
Austin Peay, Central Arkansas, Eastern Kentucky, North Alabama and West Georgia left to join the formerly-known Western Athletic Conference. The ASUN will welcome a new member in West Florida, which is making the jump from Division II to join the ASUN.
While those five schools left the ASUN in the offseason, it won't be the last time Stetson and the rest of the conference will play them. It was done as a strategic move to align the WAC, now rebranded as the UAC, and the ASUN under their new partnership, Unisun Sports.
Unisun Sports is a joint venture that aims to build and support a "strategic alliance between both conferences," according to an Atlantic Sun press release. The ASUN and UAC will share resources and revenue through various methods, including designated crossover games in participating sports.
The Daytona Beach News-Journal caught up with Stetson athletic director Ricky Ray to share his thoughts on the partnership and its effect on the Hatters' athletic programs ahead of its July 1 launch date. The following conversation has been lighted edited for clarity and length.
Daytona Beach News-Journal: What’s this mean for Stetson?
Ricky Ray: We’re going to be in an all-sport conference in the Atlantic Sun with a lot of schools that either look like us and/or are close by. Of the eight schools in the ASUN, five will be in the state of Florida, and the three that are outside Florida are smaller private schools that resemble Stetson. This enables us to cut down on our travel, keep our student athletes in class more and should make for a much better experience for them that way. I think, just from an overall perspective, it enables us to continue to play these schools that we’ve established some natural rivalries with in the ASUN, like Jacksonville, North Florida and Florida Gulf Coast. It enables us to continue while achieving those goals of improving the experience and being more financially responsible.
DBNJ: You said it’s all sports. Does that include football, because I know you guys are in the Pioneer League?
RR: No, because that’s the non-scholarship option. So we’ll stay there for that, but all the rest of our sports outside of football and rowing will remain in the Atlantic Sun.
DBNJ: Does this open an eventual path to scholarship football becoming an option?
RR: It would be tough. Again with the scholarship, obviously we’re making money on tuition, so if you look at that from a financial perspective, that would have to be taken into consideration. And again, I’ll go back to what I said about the Atlantic Sun on the Pioneer League side. That’s a really good group of institutions to be mentioned with, a lot of really great private institutions that represent a lot of different other conferences, but we play together in football. … So that group is still a pretty prestigious group to be a part of.
DBNJ: Does this partnership change the way you schedule across all sports? Are there a certain number of guaranteed games you have to play against UAC teams?
RR: Yeah, so we’ll cross over to the UAC in men’s and women’s basketball. We will have four to five crossover games for the men and four to five for the women this year. And then in sports where we may not have enough to have two full conferences, we’ll continue to play together. The example I’ll use is men’s soccer. There’s only one school in the UAC that sponsors it, which is Central Arkansas, so they’ll just play in the ASUN. Beach volleyball, there’s not enough on both sides to have two conferences, so we’ll continue to play together until our numbers grow. So it gives us that flexibility to be able to do that and keep those groups together and keep those automatic bids.
DBNJ: So right now, that’s just men’s and women’s basketball?
RR: Yeah, we’ll do crossover (games) in men’s and women’s basketball for at least the next couple of years, for sure. … And then we had some conversation at the consortium level of, "What does this look like moving forward? Is it always going to be crossover games, or do we have mini tournaments or something like that during the season?"
DBNJ: When did these talks start around both conferences and your athletic office? What was the process of getting this partnership set up?
RR: I think the conversations were pretty heavy at the presidential level, along with Jeff Bacon, who’s the commissioner. Stetson’s president, Chris Roellke, was extremely involved, as he’s the chair of the president’s committee. It sort of became apparent that something was going to happen with the Western Athletic Conference as some schools were leaving that conference. The creative thought of being able to, instead of just merge, actually combine forces, so to speak, and have two thriving conferences with two automatic bids, it just made so much sense. It was going to enable both conferences to be a little more regionally based. It gives the opportunity for those conferences, like I mentioned, to look a little more like each other while still working together. When you take 17 schools to market to sell media rights or to sell corporate sponsorships, that’s a bigger number, a lot bigger footprint, than just what one conference would be. So it gives you that buying power, but it also gives you the flexibility to where if (the ASUN) wants to do things differently as a conference, we can. It really gives us a ton of options, so it just seemed like the right move from the start once we figured out that we could still operate together later.
DBNJ: Is that why Austin Peay, Central Arkansas, Eastern Kentucky, North Alabama and West Georgia left for the WAC? Was this already in place when they started going over there?
RR: Yeah, this was sort of done at that point. These are the schools that would be in the new conference with the new Texas schools coming over to the WAC, and then the ASUN would be the non-scholarship football-playing private schools, and then the Florida schools as well. So it sort of divided pretty well regionally, and then we’re able to, for the most part, pair up schools that look like each other.
DBNJ: So it was a strategic thing to balance both geographically?
RR: Absolutely.
DBNJ: Was the partnership just unanimous immediately across the board, or were there some difficulties?
RR: I’m not privy to what was said in the president’s room, but I think, at least with the athletic directors, there were certainly a lot of questions in the beginning about how we would do this. Who was on which side? How are we going to run our day to day? But I think people really did start to get excited about it and can see where the benefits truly were. And as it sort of became more real, I think everybody was pretty much on board.
DBNJ: I mean, it makes sense when you make more money, right?
RR: With the way college athletics is changing daily, it feels like this was such an out-of-the-box type of idea. In an era of conferences with 14, 16 teams, that we could have a group that was that big but actually able to divide into two smaller, more robust conferences that made regional sense, that hasn’t been done. So to be on the forefront of that was exciting.
DBNJ: I was going to say, has this ever been done before?
RR: Not to my knowledge, two conferences being operated out of the same as a group. Again, just being able to be on the forefront of something like that and see how it is going to work each time we meet as a group, all 17 of us, there’s a new thing you have to figure out, so that part’s exciting as well. I think it’s a great model, and I think it’ll be interesting to see how this grows as the years go on.
DBNJ: Is this the reality of college sports now where mid-major schools might have to team up?
RR: I don’t know if it’s the exact future, but I think it is certainly something that a lot of people could potentially take a look at. With finances being what they are, anything you can do to save money at this point and reallocate it, either toward being more competitive or providing a better student-athlete experience, is huge. And the way this partnership is played out, we’re going to be able to travel less, do more for our students, while generating more revenue at the league level because of our numbers and our arrangement. Right now, that’s what we’re all trying to figure out, is how to do those things.
DBNJ: Were there any examples you had in mind or goals you were hoping for in this first year?
RR: I think that, for me, the first year, it’ll just be interesting to see how a new league structure shakes out. Obviously financially, but competitively, you look at a situation where we have to beat seven other schools to get an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, and a lot of other people have to beat a lot of other people. So just being in an eight-team conference in most of our sports, I think competitively, is exciting. If I was a student athlete or coach here, I’d be really excited about that opportunity. And then I think it’ll be interesting to have conversations with our coaches and our student athletes at the end of the year and see how they feel about it and how the season progressed for them. Certainly, I think that the reduced travel isn’t going to hurt anybody’s feelings, for sure. The other thing I’ll say, too, about our league is that there’s some great cities in our league, and there’s great opportunity both for our student athletes and our fans to visit some really awesome places. When you think about where all the schools in Florida are located and being able to now go to Pensacola and be in that market is awesome. But anytime you leave the state, you’re going to Charlotte or Nashville or Louisville. These are all great opportunities, good cities that have prospective students. So it’s a great opportunity for the university as a whole to market in some good areas.
DBNJ: So to summarize, this partnership will mostly take effect in men’s and women’s basketball because that’s just where you guys have the most participation, and then in sports like men’s soccer, it would be a one-off, unofficial crossover game?
RR: That’s where we’re gonna cross over. It’s in effect across all sports all year, so this is the first year of the new ASUN and the new UAC, but the only two sports we’re gonna do official crossover games are men's and women’s basketball. (The other sports) will still just be one conference. Beach volleyball will still play as one conference and both lacrosse will still look the same.
DBNJ: And then any additional money you would make for your program, would that spread around all sports if men’s and women’s basketball are the ones doing the crossovers?
RR: Yeah, any additional revenues that come in help us all. It all goes to general athletics. Same thing for any savings we get with the travel, it just benefits all of us at this point.
DBNJ: Is there anything I missed that would be notable or exciting about this new partnership?
RR: No, I think you covered it. The biggest thing is just making people understand from the Stetson perspective, we’re still the ASUN. It’ll just look a little different.
DBNJ: Because there are fewer teams to kind of even this out.
RR: Yeah, they’ll be on the UAC side, and the UAC will have their football league, which will be great. It’ll be really good football. There’s some good teams in that league, so it’s super cool. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out, and it’ll continue to evolve, so we’ll keep learning things.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: What ASUN-UAC partnership means for Stetson Hatters | Ricky Ray Q&A
Continue reading...
Austin Peay, Central Arkansas, Eastern Kentucky, North Alabama and West Georgia left to join the formerly-known Western Athletic Conference. The ASUN will welcome a new member in West Florida, which is making the jump from Division II to join the ASUN.
While those five schools left the ASUN in the offseason, it won't be the last time Stetson and the rest of the conference will play them. It was done as a strategic move to align the WAC, now rebranded as the UAC, and the ASUN under their new partnership, Unisun Sports.
You must be registered for see images attach
Unisun Sports is a joint venture that aims to build and support a "strategic alliance between both conferences," according to an Atlantic Sun press release. The ASUN and UAC will share resources and revenue through various methods, including designated crossover games in participating sports.
The Daytona Beach News-Journal caught up with Stetson athletic director Ricky Ray to share his thoughts on the partnership and its effect on the Hatters' athletic programs ahead of its July 1 launch date. The following conversation has been lighted edited for clarity and length.
The details on the new partnership between the ASUN and UAC
Daytona Beach News-Journal: What’s this mean for Stetson?
Ricky Ray: We’re going to be in an all-sport conference in the Atlantic Sun with a lot of schools that either look like us and/or are close by. Of the eight schools in the ASUN, five will be in the state of Florida, and the three that are outside Florida are smaller private schools that resemble Stetson. This enables us to cut down on our travel, keep our student athletes in class more and should make for a much better experience for them that way. I think, just from an overall perspective, it enables us to continue to play these schools that we’ve established some natural rivalries with in the ASUN, like Jacksonville, North Florida and Florida Gulf Coast. It enables us to continue while achieving those goals of improving the experience and being more financially responsible.
DBNJ: You said it’s all sports. Does that include football, because I know you guys are in the Pioneer League?
RR: No, because that’s the non-scholarship option. So we’ll stay there for that, but all the rest of our sports outside of football and rowing will remain in the Atlantic Sun.
You must be registered for see images attach
DBNJ: Does this open an eventual path to scholarship football becoming an option?
RR: It would be tough. Again with the scholarship, obviously we’re making money on tuition, so if you look at that from a financial perspective, that would have to be taken into consideration. And again, I’ll go back to what I said about the Atlantic Sun on the Pioneer League side. That’s a really good group of institutions to be mentioned with, a lot of really great private institutions that represent a lot of different other conferences, but we play together in football. … So that group is still a pretty prestigious group to be a part of.
DBNJ: Does this partnership change the way you schedule across all sports? Are there a certain number of guaranteed games you have to play against UAC teams?
RR: Yeah, so we’ll cross over to the UAC in men’s and women’s basketball. We will have four to five crossover games for the men and four to five for the women this year. And then in sports where we may not have enough to have two full conferences, we’ll continue to play together. The example I’ll use is men’s soccer. There’s only one school in the UAC that sponsors it, which is Central Arkansas, so they’ll just play in the ASUN. Beach volleyball, there’s not enough on both sides to have two conferences, so we’ll continue to play together until our numbers grow. So it gives us that flexibility to be able to do that and keep those groups together and keep those automatic bids.
DBNJ: So right now, that’s just men’s and women’s basketball?
You must be registered for see images attach
RR: Yeah, we’ll do crossover (games) in men’s and women’s basketball for at least the next couple of years, for sure. … And then we had some conversation at the consortium level of, "What does this look like moving forward? Is it always going to be crossover games, or do we have mini tournaments or something like that during the season?"
DBNJ: When did these talks start around both conferences and your athletic office? What was the process of getting this partnership set up?
RR: I think the conversations were pretty heavy at the presidential level, along with Jeff Bacon, who’s the commissioner. Stetson’s president, Chris Roellke, was extremely involved, as he’s the chair of the president’s committee. It sort of became apparent that something was going to happen with the Western Athletic Conference as some schools were leaving that conference. The creative thought of being able to, instead of just merge, actually combine forces, so to speak, and have two thriving conferences with two automatic bids, it just made so much sense. It was going to enable both conferences to be a little more regionally based. It gives the opportunity for those conferences, like I mentioned, to look a little more like each other while still working together. When you take 17 schools to market to sell media rights or to sell corporate sponsorships, that’s a bigger number, a lot bigger footprint, than just what one conference would be. So it gives you that buying power, but it also gives you the flexibility to where if (the ASUN) wants to do things differently as a conference, we can. It really gives us a ton of options, so it just seemed like the right move from the start once we figured out that we could still operate together later.
DBNJ: Is that why Austin Peay, Central Arkansas, Eastern Kentucky, North Alabama and West Georgia left for the WAC? Was this already in place when they started going over there?
RR: Yeah, this was sort of done at that point. These are the schools that would be in the new conference with the new Texas schools coming over to the WAC, and then the ASUN would be the non-scholarship football-playing private schools, and then the Florida schools as well. So it sort of divided pretty well regionally, and then we’re able to, for the most part, pair up schools that look like each other.
DBNJ: So it was a strategic thing to balance both geographically?
RR: Absolutely.
DBNJ: Was the partnership just unanimous immediately across the board, or were there some difficulties?
RR: I’m not privy to what was said in the president’s room, but I think, at least with the athletic directors, there were certainly a lot of questions in the beginning about how we would do this. Who was on which side? How are we going to run our day to day? But I think people really did start to get excited about it and can see where the benefits truly were. And as it sort of became more real, I think everybody was pretty much on board.
DBNJ: I mean, it makes sense when you make more money, right?
RR: With the way college athletics is changing daily, it feels like this was such an out-of-the-box type of idea. In an era of conferences with 14, 16 teams, that we could have a group that was that big but actually able to divide into two smaller, more robust conferences that made regional sense, that hasn’t been done. So to be on the forefront of that was exciting.
Could the ASUN and UAC be college sports trend-setters?
DBNJ: I was going to say, has this ever been done before?
RR: Not to my knowledge, two conferences being operated out of the same as a group. Again, just being able to be on the forefront of something like that and see how it is going to work each time we meet as a group, all 17 of us, there’s a new thing you have to figure out, so that part’s exciting as well. I think it’s a great model, and I think it’ll be interesting to see how this grows as the years go on.
DBNJ: Is this the reality of college sports now where mid-major schools might have to team up?
You must be registered for see images attach
RR: I don’t know if it’s the exact future, but I think it is certainly something that a lot of people could potentially take a look at. With finances being what they are, anything you can do to save money at this point and reallocate it, either toward being more competitive or providing a better student-athlete experience, is huge. And the way this partnership is played out, we’re going to be able to travel less, do more for our students, while generating more revenue at the league level because of our numbers and our arrangement. Right now, that’s what we’re all trying to figure out, is how to do those things.
DBNJ: Were there any examples you had in mind or goals you were hoping for in this first year?
RR: I think that, for me, the first year, it’ll just be interesting to see how a new league structure shakes out. Obviously financially, but competitively, you look at a situation where we have to beat seven other schools to get an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, and a lot of other people have to beat a lot of other people. So just being in an eight-team conference in most of our sports, I think competitively, is exciting. If I was a student athlete or coach here, I’d be really excited about that opportunity. And then I think it’ll be interesting to have conversations with our coaches and our student athletes at the end of the year and see how they feel about it and how the season progressed for them. Certainly, I think that the reduced travel isn’t going to hurt anybody’s feelings, for sure. The other thing I’ll say, too, about our league is that there’s some great cities in our league, and there’s great opportunity both for our student athletes and our fans to visit some really awesome places. When you think about where all the schools in Florida are located and being able to now go to Pensacola and be in that market is awesome. But anytime you leave the state, you’re going to Charlotte or Nashville or Louisville. These are all great opportunities, good cities that have prospective students. So it’s a great opportunity for the university as a whole to market in some good areas.
Bottom line: Stetson remains in the ASUN
DBNJ: So to summarize, this partnership will mostly take effect in men’s and women’s basketball because that’s just where you guys have the most participation, and then in sports like men’s soccer, it would be a one-off, unofficial crossover game?
RR: That’s where we’re gonna cross over. It’s in effect across all sports all year, so this is the first year of the new ASUN and the new UAC, but the only two sports we’re gonna do official crossover games are men's and women’s basketball. (The other sports) will still just be one conference. Beach volleyball will still play as one conference and both lacrosse will still look the same.
DBNJ: And then any additional money you would make for your program, would that spread around all sports if men’s and women’s basketball are the ones doing the crossovers?
RR: Yeah, any additional revenues that come in help us all. It all goes to general athletics. Same thing for any savings we get with the travel, it just benefits all of us at this point.
DBNJ: Is there anything I missed that would be notable or exciting about this new partnership?
RR: No, I think you covered it. The biggest thing is just making people understand from the Stetson perspective, we’re still the ASUN. It’ll just look a little different.
DBNJ: Because there are fewer teams to kind of even this out.
RR: Yeah, they’ll be on the UAC side, and the UAC will have their football league, which will be great. It’ll be really good football. There’s some good teams in that league, so it’s super cool. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out, and it’ll continue to evolve, so we’ll keep learning things.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: What ASUN-UAC partnership means for Stetson Hatters | Ricky Ray Q&A
Continue reading...
