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Article by Kyle Whilliston on the expansion of the Great West Conference


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Looks like some of the teams that have been making overtures to the Summit League have now found a permanant home:

For Division I independents like Texas-Pan American, memorable basketball moments tend to include long bus rides, 40-point shellackings at power-conference arenas and an annual psychological thud when the season ends in February instead of March. That's why head coach Tom Schuberth tries to schedule as many two-day, four-team mini tournaments as he can during November and December.

"From our perspective, those tournaments are outstanding," said Schuberth, whose team went 18-13 last season but managed only one runner-up placement in five weekend events. "I get really excited about them, there's a lot of uncertainty going in. If we win our first game, then we're playing for a title. If not, we can still go home with a split. Without being in a conference with a championship to play for, it makes it even more thrilling."

Texas-Pan American coach Tom Schuberth is happy his Broncs have found a home in the newly-formed Great West.

UTPA dropped out of the Sun Belt a decade ago, but its days of playing solely for championships at the Iowa Realty Invitational and Montana State Classic are drawing to a close. This summer, the school and five others joined up with the Great West Conference, a league that will begin basketball operations for the 2009-10 season. The GWC, in addition to altering the hoops landscape as the 32nd Division I conference, could also significantly impact the shape of the NCAA tournament's bracket in the next decade.

The league was originally conceived as a collective for football teams transitioning from Division II to the I-AA level (now known as the Football Championship Subdivision). A group of upwardly mobile western universities -- Cal Poly, UC Davis, North and South Dakota State, Southern Utah and Northern Colorado -- came together under the Great West umbrella in 2004.

"The premise of it was just to let the student-athletes at these schools play for something," said Great West commissioner Ed Grom. "The conference was built to let schools without a home come together as a league … with weekly awards, standings and at the end, a championship."

But after four years, Great West football is no charity case. The alliance has built itself into an gridiron powerhouse, currently placed fourth of 14 leagues in the Sagarin FCS ratings, behind mid-major conferences with names very familiar to basketball fans: the Colonial Athletic, Missouri Valley and SoCon. Following in the same spirit as the headline-grabbing upsets pulled off by those leagues in recent years, GWC football teams have upended FBS schools such as Minnesota (North Dakota State) and San Diego (UC Davis).

And after a quiet announcement on July 10 that it was expanding to all sports by inviting six formerly nonaffiliated schools -- UTPA, NJIT, Houston Baptist, Utah Valley and D-II transitionals North Dakota and South Dakota -- the Great West has become huger than huge.  Perhaps not in basketball stature quite yet, but the 2,176 miles from Newark, N.J., to Orem, Utah, will represent the biggest heel-to-toe geographic footprint of any of the Division I conferences based solely in the continental United States. (The WAC, which includes Hawaii, is 4,034 miles end to end.)

Call it what you will, but the Great West is never going to be a bus league.

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"The premise of it was just to let the student-athletes at these schools play for something," said Great West commissioner Ed Grom. "The conference was built to let schools without a home come together as a league … with weekly awards, standings and at the end, a championship."

Reading between the lines:  Ed Grom, Summit League associate commissioner for many years, and a fixture at conference championship events in Tulsa, very quietly made his quasi-association with the Great West Conference a permanent one a couple of months ago.

Ed will be sorely missed in a variety of areas involving the league office.  He was always very approachable and seemed to have a lot of respect for ORU.

Anyone else at all concerned that both our commissioner (Tom Douple) and our new associate commissioner (Myndee Kay Larsen) come from the same league school (Southern Utah)?

Or that the league office only has seven full-time employees?

Or that, if you go to the Summit League website, and click on "Basketball Championships", it still has no information at all about the tournament in Sioux Falls?

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  • 6 months later...

Someone told me that North Dakota has agreed to change its mascot from the Fighting Sioux in order to appease the NCAA. It appears we might have two new member to the Summit League - maybe as soon as this summer. I'm not sure how soon they would actually begin league play though - if it happens.

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