Monmouth College Athletics

NCAA and Conference Memberships

Since its formation in 1853 by persons of Scottish Presbyterian heritage, Monmouth College has maintained a solid relationship with its ecumenical roots. In the realm of athletics the college also sought to establish permanent national and conference affiliations to provide its student-athletes increased opportunities for competition and success through sports.

Monmouth has been a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) since the organization’s inception in 1910. The college has been an NCAA Division III (non-scholarship) member since the three-division system was adopted in August of 1973. Over the years Monmouth teams and individuals have advanced to NCAA national tournaments and participated in individual competition in a variety of sports.

On the regional level Monmouth’s athletic teams initially competed in the Illinois Intercollegiate Athletic Association until 1901 but the college’s first entry into actual conference competition came in 1910 with the formation of the “Athletic Conference of the Middle-West.” This league was comprised of Beloit, Lake Forest, Knox, Armour Tech and Monmouth and eventually changed its name in 1914 to the “Little 5 Conference” to accurately reflect its membership. Armour would drop out of the league in 1917 and was replaced by Northwestern College (later North Central of Naperville) before the conference was dissolved in 1920.

Monmouth also held brief affiliations with several other organizations in the early years of the century, groups which were conveniently connected by geography or schedule. The most notable of these leagues was the “Little 19 Conference,” which included almost all colleges and universities in the state of Illinois. In addition to Monmouth, “Little 19” members included a group of future Division III and NAIA schools (North Central, Carthage, Illinois College, Illinois Wesleyan, Knox, Augustana, Elmhurst, McKendree, Eureka, Wheaton), the precursors of the state university system (Southern Normal, Western Normal, Illinois Normal, Bradley, Eastern Teachers, Northern Normal) and two now-defunct schools (St. Viator and Shurtleff). In 1937 the state universities left the league, which gained additional small college members and survived until the World War II years as the “Illinois College Conference” or “Central Illinois Conference”. However, Monmouth’s long-term conference affiliation was stabilized in 1924 when it accepted a bid to join the fledgling Midwest Collegiate Athletic Conference, an association which would become the Midwest Conference.

The Creation of the Midwest Conference

The Midwest Collegiate Athletic Conference (MCAC) had its inception in the minds of a group of educators in several liberal arts colleges of the Middle West during the period immediately following World War I. On December 30, 1920, an informal discussion between representatives of six of these colleges was held at the University Club in Chicago. At this meeting, initial steps were taken that were to lead to the formation of a new athletic conference. The colleges represented at the preliminary gathering were Beloit, Carleton, Coe, DePauw, Knox and Wabash. 

The initial meeting having proven successful, a second gathering was planned for May 12, 1921, at Coe College and the first athletic contest of the new league was scheduled. This event, held in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on May 13, 1921, was an invitational track and field meet. Nine colleges were invited to be participants and six took part in the historic competition: Beloit, Carleton, Coe, Cornell, Knox and Lawrence. Cornell claimed the honor of winning the meet and the first championship in the new association. DePauw and Wabash withdrew after the first meeting in Chicago and therefore were never members of the new conference. Thereafter, only colleges from the states of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin were considered eligible for membership. 

Seven colleges, including new member Hamline, sent representatives to a meeting in Chicago on December 19, 1921. These seven, the charter members of the conference, voted at this meeting to extend official membership to Millikin University, thus enlarging the association to eight colleges before regular athletic schedules had been arranged or dual contests played between any teams. The 1922-1923 academic year was to see the beginning of such competition in both football and basketball. 

The first annual meeting of the “Mid-West Collegiate Athletic Conference” (the hyphen and capital W in the title were later dropped) was held at Carleton College on May 19, 1922. The eight-college Midwest Conference was a going concern as the 1922-23 college year began, but changes in the alignment of its constituent colleges were in the near future. Ripon was officially granted membership in 1923 and Monmouth joined the association in 1924, bringing the total temporarily to ten colleges. 

However, Millikin withdrew from the group in 1924 without having participated fully in any of its activities and Hamline dropped out of the league in 1930. This move left Carleton as the only college in Minnesota, creating new and difficult problems involving schedules, travel expenses, and extra loss of class time for students on long trips for single games. That problem was solved in 1938 when Grinnell College accepted an invitation to join the Midwest Conference effective with the opening of the 1939-40 school year. At that time, the association began functioning again as an organization of nine member colleges and had seemingly weathered the days of the depression.

The athletic program at Monmouth was also growing. In addition to the four major sports already in competition the college had added men’s cross country (1927), tennis (1928), swimming (1927) and wrestling (1926) to its program. The 1930's saw the addition of men’s golf (1934) to bring the total to nine sport teams, all of which were eligible to compete for Midwest Conference championship titles.

Growing Pains in the MCAC

Despite the progress of the college and the new league in the late 1930s, the times were still unsettled. War was once more threatening on the global stage, and there were soon to be new and difficult internal questions regarding schedule, travel and equal opportunity amongst all conference member schools.   

For the first four football seasons of 1922-25 no team played more than four league opponents, therefore teams winning only one or two games and losing none several times tied for the “conference championship.” This arrangement was temporarily improved in the late 1920's when some colleges played five or six league games. There followed a slumping period, from 1930 to 1935, during which no MCAC football team played more than four games with its conference opponents and two victories were again enough to back up a championship claim. 

Much the same situation existed in basketball. The earliest schedules included very uneven numbers of league games for the different colleges. The uncertainty surrounding championship titles was apparent and soon the conference arranged to award the basketball championship on a basis of eight conference games, with a maximum of twelve games with Midwest opponents permitted. This ratio was maintained with reasonable success in the 8-team league until the late 1930’s.

Just prior to 1940, however, a strong movement developed in the conference to require six football games and twelve basketball games for the championship race. After the 1940-41 season, Carleton, due to its geographical position as the lone Minnesota representative, withdrew temporarily from the Midwest Conference on the grounds that round-robin schedules placed them at too great a disadvantage because of frequent long trips and stayed out of the league for the next five years. The MCAC was once again reduced to eight members and now had to also face the reality of another world war.