The Atlantic Solar and the Soccer Championship Subdivision (FCS) WAC have agreed to merge and kind a 10-member all-soccer convention and make the soar to the FBS, in response to a report by ESPN’s Pete Thamel.
After the transfer is full, the member faculties will kind the eleventh FBS convention.
This might be the primary time since 1999, when the Mountain West was fashioned, {that a} new convention would be part of the FBS.
WAC soccer members Stephen F. Austin, Abilene Christian, Utah Tech, Southern Utah and Tarleton State will be part of Atlantic Solar members Austin Peay, Jap Kentucky, Central Arkansas and North Alabama to kind the newly merged FBS convention. There may be presently no title for the brand new convention, however it’s known as “ASUN-WAC Soccer” within the planning course of.
The league plans to start out enjoying collectively in 2024 with 9 members earlier than including an extra workforce, UT Rio Grande Valley, and shifting to FBS. UT Rio Grande Valley simply introduced that it’s beginning a soccer program and is anticipated to hitch the league in 2025 because the tenth member of the convention.
The listed faculties have signed a “multi-party time period sheet settlement” to decide to play within the new league and that the colleges “need to kind an affiliation for the event and operation of a soccer-only convention.”
Based on Thamel’s report, there’s ambiguity hanging over the method for turning into an FBS league, however all FCS faculties concerned should undergo a proper transition course of. The anomaly is current because of the present moratorium on NCAA Division I athletics in single-sport conferences. Ending the moratorium would require a vote on the matter by the NCAA Division I board of administrators.
For FCS faculties to leap to FBS, there’s usually a two-year transition interval that might require board approval. There have been no discussions about how the brand new convention would match into the Expanded School Soccer Playoff, however that’s anticipated to vary within the close to future.