Monmouth College Athletics

MCAC Membership Changes

Seeking to balance its constituency in both numbers and geography, the MCAC offered membership to a second Minnesota school, St. Olaf College, in 1952. St. Olaf accepted and the MCAC remained a stable conference of ten teams for over 20 years, enjoying healthy competition and vigorous rivalries between its member schools. The decades of the 1970’s and 1980’s brought unprecedented change, due in part to the emergence of other regional and state conferences. St. Olaf departed in 1974 but the Midwest Conference remained a ten-school league with the addition of Lake Forest in the same year. This alignment lasted only two years as the University of Chicago became the conference’s 11th member school in 1976.

The odd number resulted in scheduling difficulties and a variety of tournament formats in the respective sport schedules and, in an attempt to resolve some of the conflict, the conference adopted a two-division system for competition in major team sports in 1976. Schools were divided by location, first into East and West Divisions and later into North and South Divisions. The odd-number situation was temporarily relieved when Carleton withdrew from the league in 1982 and the conference added St. Norbert and Illinois College to bring its membership to an all-time high of 12 schools. Chicago left in 1987 and Carroll was added in 1992 to allow the conference to maintain two separate four- or five-team divisions through those years. The conference’s most recent change was caused by the dual defection of South Division members Coe and Cornell following the 1996-97 school year, a move which resulted in another round of tournament format changes and divisional realignment. Cornell would return to the league at the start of the 2012-13 season.

Sport Sponsorship in the MCAC

The Midwest Conference made it clear early in its formative years that it did not intend to be a one-sport organization. From the beginning it aimed at balance and a varied program, in which large numbers of students would be engaged the entire year in all the sports appropriate to conditions at its liberal arts colleges. The MCAC, however, had to base its first intercollegiate athletic schedules on sports far enough developed in the 1920’s to make possible sensible and satisfactory competition. This meant that, during its first decade, the Conference had to depend entirely on the momentum generated by the three major sports of football, basketball, and track.

Track and Field and Baseball actually began informal “conference” competition as early as the late 1800s, meeting as part of the annual Debate and Speech competition. Intercollegiate competition sponsored by the conference officially opened with a track and field meet in May 1921 and a second meet was held the following year. In the fall of 1922, the first official Midwest Conference football schedule was launched and basketball competition followed immediately during the winter of 1922-23.

This major-sport pattern involving football, basketball and track was maintained without change until the fall of 1929 when the first Midwest Conference Cross Country Meet was run on a course at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. This breakthrough addition of a minor sport allowed the league to move toward its original goal of a broad overall athletic program.

Tennis and golf were the fifth and sixth intercollegiate sports officially recognized by the MCAC. The first Midwest Conference Tennis Tournament was held on May 30, 1931, at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A year later, on May 28, 1932, a Midwest Conference Golf Tournament was held at Galesburg, Illinois, with Knox College serving as the host school. The advocates of two popular indoor winter sports, swimming and wrestling, soon won their case for recognition. Lawrence hosted the first Midwest Conference Swimming Meet in Appleton, Wisconsin, on March 7, 1936, and also served as the site for the initial Midwest Conference Wrestling Tournament two years later on March 5, 1938.

The addition of these sports now meant championship competition in eight sports and, aside from the setbacks and cancellations caused by World War II, the conference schedules remained unchanged for sixteen years. The war conditions of the mid-1940’s delayed the elevation of baseball to a position as the ninth sponsored championship sport. After several unsuccessful attempts in earlier years, enough colleges arranged to field teams in 1954 to make a league title possible and in that year the conference voted to add baseball to its official program. Another sixteen years passed before the number of sponsored sports increased again. Soccer was added in 1971 and indoor track, a winter activity as distinguished from the parent outdoor spring sport, gained official championship status in 1977.

Monmouth added a soccer team to its intercollegiate program in 1972 and the college, which had been participating in informal indoor track and field meets, made indoor track an official varsity sport with the MCAC recognition in 1977. This increased Monmouth’s schedule to 11 sports at the time. Since then the college has dropped sponsorship of wrestling, and for a time dropped golf. Women’s golf was added in the fall of 1999 and the men’s program was reinstated in the spring of 2000.

Due to a lack of sponsorship among current member schools, wrestling was dropped by the Midwest Conference after the 1996-97 season.

A League For Women

All of the aforementioned sports and activities involved only competition for men. As athletic opportunities for women expanded in the late 1970’s from intramural recreation and the concept of the female athlete increased to a position of acceptance in society, the demand for varsity competition was heightened on the collegiate level. Women had actually been participating in a wide range of intramural athletic activities at the college as early as the 1900’s. Basketball, swimming, track, field hockey, rifle and baseball were all popular sports for women at Monmouth.

As part of Title IX Gender Equity, women’s intercollegiate sports were officially offered at Monmouth in 1974. Volleyball was the college’s first female intercollegiate sport, beginning competition in the fall of 1974, and basketball and softball began official varsity schedules in the winter and spring seasons of the 1974-75 academic year. Outdoor track and field and cross country were both added in 1981 and indoor track became an official sport in 1983. After several years as a club sport, soccer was elevated to varsity status in 1994 and women’s golf made its debut at Monmouth in the fall of 1999. Women’s tennis competition which was played between 1919 and 1925 was reactivated between 1974 and 1991. The program was ceased following the 1991 season, but made another comeback beginning in 2002.

The expansion and addition of women’s sports required additional regulation, an idea the Midwest Conference recognized in the late 1970's. As one of the schools at the front of the women’s athletic movement within the conference, Monmouth joined with several MCAC schools to create a new women’s league to meet the demand and provide female athletes with a separate voice in controlling their athletic business. The Midwest Athletic Conference for Women (MACW) was created in 1977 to conduct women’s championship competition and regulate sports among the existing conference’s member schools and was designed to be an equal yet independent governing body.

The MACW was originally composed of five teams – Monmouth, Knox, Coe, Cornell and Grinnell – and held its first tournament for volleyball in 1978. Illinois and Beloit were added to MACW competition in 1981 and the league’s remaining Wisconsin schools joined in 1984. This allowed for full conference participation and the formation of separate North and South Divisions. The 1978-79 athletic seasons featured Midwest Conference championship tournaments in volleyball, tennis, cross country, basketball, swimming, softball and outdoor track. Indoor track was added in 1984, soccer in 1986 and golf in 1996 to increase the women’s championship sports sponsorship to 10 sports.

The Present Midwest Conference

With issues of gender equity, administrative efficiency and national Title IX legislation becoming major concerns for college and university athletic programs nationwide, the athletic representatives of the two separate leagues pondered the idea of a joint athletic conference. After months of planning and discussion between faculty representatives, coaches, athletic directors and college administrators, a merger of the MCAC and MACW leagues was officially announced and the present Midwest Conference (MWC) was created in 1994. According to the new league’s mission statement, the intent of the union was “to preserve both groups’ traditions while enhancing administrative efficiency and fostering equity between men’s and women’s sports.” Furthermore the statement reads that the purpose of the Midwest Conference has always been to “maintain athletic activities on a plane in keeping with the dignity and high purpose of liberal education.”

As of the fall of 2012, 11 teams maintained membership in the MWC – after an absence, Cornell rejoined Monmouth, Knox, Grinnell, Illinois College, Lake Forest, Lawrence, Carroll, Ripon, Beloit and St. Norbert in the fall of 2012. Several sports play round-robin or modified regular-season schedules to determine postseason tournament teams while others determine conference individual and team titles at a season-ending championship meet. Men’s and women’s tennis and baseball and softball still use the divisional play to determine qualifiers for the MWC Championship Tournament.