Summit League Adds Northern Colorado, St. Thomas In Key Moves For Its Future

Image credit: (Photo by Mike Janes/Four Seam)

The Summit League this week announced a pair of additions for the 2022 season that are of critical importance to its future as a baseball conference.

The Summit on Tuesday announced Northern Colorado will join the conference as a baseball-only member. That news was followed Wednesday by a decision from the NCAA’s Division I Council to approve an unprecedented waiver to allow St. Thomas (Minn.) to jump straight from Division III to Division I and accept an invitation to join the Summit. Both Northern Colorado and St. Thomas will join the league for the 2022 season.

The Summit needed to add at least one member for baseball before the 2023 season, or it would have lost its automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. A conference is required to have at least six members in any given sport to receive an automatic bid and after Purdue-Fort Wayne this month left the Summit for the Horizon League, the Summit was left with five baseball-playing members. Conferences that fall to five members in a sport are automatically given a two-year waiver to give them a chance to regroup. So, while the Summit’s five-team setup in 2021 won’t be ideal, its champion will still be assured of a regionals bid.

St. Thomas will next year begin the move from Division III to Division I, a process that in the past has required a stop in Division II. The school, located in St. Paul, Minn., is well-positioned to do so with an undergraduate enrollment of more than 6,000 students and an athletics program that dominated the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference to the point that it was kicked out.

On the diamond, the Tommies won the Division III national championship in 2001 and 2009 and finished as runners-up in 1999 and 2000. They last reached the Division III College World Series in 2014, but have made the NCAA Tournament just once since (2017). St. Thomas this spring was off to a 6-1 start.

How competitive St. Thomas can be as it leaps into Division I remains to be seen. Teams like Cal Baptist and Grand Canyon in recent years have made seamless transitions from Division II, but the jump from Division III—where athletic scholarships are not permitted—will be steeper.

Northern Colorado has a rich baseball history and has reached the College World Series 10 times—all from 1952-74. The Bears later dropped to Division II before returning to Division I in 2006. Since then their baseball program has been nomadic, competing as an independent, a member of the Great West Conference and, most recently, the WAC.

Since joining the WAC in 2014, the Bears’ most successful season was in 2018. They went 29-22 and finished fifth in the conference standings.

The additions have secured the Summit’s automatic bid in baseball going forward and move the conference’s center further north and west. The conference now stretches from Oral Roberts in the south to Northern Colorado in the west to North Dakota State in the north and Western Illinois to the east.

Northern Colorado’s departure is the latest move in an ever-changing WAC. Already this summer, Chicago State eliminated its program, Cal State Bakersfield moved to the Big West and Dixie State and Tarleton State joined the conference from Division II. The WAC now has nine baseball members, spanning the West from Texas to Seattle.