CGN Roundtable: Building Our Own Conferences

Conference realignment hit hard this summer, and it got our wheels spinning. What if we could build conferences with gymnastics in mind, rather than the decisions being driven by football media deals? We sat down and sketched out our dream conferences.

Have your own ideas? Let us know in the comments or on social media!

Alyssa: Northeast Conference

When it comes to conferences, I prefer when the conference actually works in relation to geography. The Northeast conference would consist of New Hampshire, LIU, Rutgers, Temple, Towson, George Washington, Maryland, Penn State, West Virginia, and Pittsburgh. All of the teams are in the same time zone and many are accessible to each other by way of bus. Maryland would be the leader of the conference, but Penn State, West Virginia, and Towson would not be far behind. The conference championship it would be a multi-round tournament. On day one there would be two snake-seeded quad meets with the teams ranked third through 10th. One session would have the third, sixth, seventh, and 10th seed and the other would have the fourth, fifth, eight, and ninth seed. The winner of each session would compete the next day against the first and second seed for the conference title.

Peri: Great Lakes Conference  

I’m with Alyssa on that conferences should mimic geography. Living beside the Great Lakes, our infrastructure follows the waterways – making commuting fairly simple for the teams I’ve selected. All 12 teams are Division I, within eight hours driving of each other, and within two hours driving of one of the five lakes. From west to east, the teams in my Great Lakes Conference are: Illinois State, Northern Illinois, Illinois, Western Michigan, Central Michigan, Michigan State, Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Bowling Green, Ohio State, Kent State, and Pittsburgh. Having 12 teams should make for a consistent regular season with in-conference play and maintain rivalries from the Big Ten and the MAC. At the end of the regular season, the top eight by NQS would advance to the championship semifinal, and four from there would decide the title on a second day of competition.  

Katie: Mississippi River Conference (MRC)

I can see that Peri has already mirrored my plan for a conference based on rivers, but I’ll ‘course’ ahead with my idea anyway! There are 10 states that have the Mississippi flowing through them, however, Mississippi itself doesn’t have any schools that support gymnastics. In order to make up for that I’ll take the four Wisconsin colleges as well as Minnesota, Iowa State (because the Big 12 isn’t the most competitively exciting gymnastics conference), Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Fisk for Tennessee, Arkansas, and LSU to make a conference of 12. I think the opportunity for college rivalry within the conference at the Wisconsin schools would add a really nice competitive regular season element, even if there was no official season hardware for the victor. The vast majority of these colleges are in the same time zone, and I think it’s really beneficial and important for student-athlete mental health to have their sleep disturbed as little as possible. 

I really like the idea of regular season meets actually counting for something so I would have NQS for regionals qualification. However, in my conference, the top 8 teams by win-loss-draw scoring (three points for a win, two for a draw, and one for a loss, with NQS tie-break rules) would advance to the Mississippi River Conference final weekend. This would be a Saturday night with a morning and evening session to maximize potential fan attendance. From this, the top four scoring teams across the two sessions would contest for the conference title on the second day of competition on Sunday at 1 p.m.

Julianna: Four Corners Conference

With there being so many conference changes announced this year for either the upcoming season or the future, one of the biggest issues to come with this is travel. Teams are going to have to be traveling on long plane or bus rides to almost all of their competitions, losing practice days and compromising their recovery during an already strenuous three to four months of competing. So, I agree with Alyssa in creating a conference with teams in close proximity to one another, but mine would focus on the teams more on the West Coast who are being placed into conferences. I think a fun conference would be the Four Corners Conference, getting teams from the ‘Four Corners’ of the U.S.; Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. So in this conference there would be Utah, BYU, Utah State, Southern Utah, Air Force, Denver, Arizona, and Arizona State.  With nine schools in this conference, I would have a two-day championship. The teams would get placed into session one or session two based on how they did in the regular season, with one session having four teams and the other five. The top two would then compete the next day in a final competition. I think this close proximity for these teams would aid in minimizing travel and prioritize the athletes being well rested and doing their best gymnastics against teams they might not normally compete against. 

Katherine: The At Law Conference

My first thought here was to go with an all-academic conference; essentially, a larger Ivy League. Then I thought it might be low-hanging fruit. So I decided to put a twist on it that was true to form for me, a newly minted Esquire: programs whose schools are also some of the country’s best law schools. To determine this conference, I started with the U.S. News & World Report 2023-2024 Best Law Schools; a metric I personally see issues with, but which proved useful and objective enough for this exercise. I decided to give my conference 10 schools, so I went down the rankings and chose the top 10 schools with gym programs, listed here in rank order: Stanford, Yale, Penn, California, Michigan, UCLA, Minnesota, Georgia, Ohio State, and Florida. Just for fun, had I extended my teams to 12, North Carolina and Arizona State would have made the cut. 

Of course, this list contains overlap with a lot of the universities that would have dictated my all-academic league. But after my list shook out per the rankings, there were some additions and snubs that I likely wouldn’t have thought of. Notably, Brown doesn’t have a law school, so that left a spot open where the academic league would have contained all Ivies by default. 

Is this list geographically feasible at all? Absolutely not, but as we’ve seen in real-life realignment, that’s not really important. 

Savanna: The Flips & Kicks Conference

Full disclosure here: I collaborated with my fiance on this since he’s a MLS fanatic. Ultimately, this conference is made up of teams that have a MLS franchise in their state and won the MLS cup. To create this conference, I took a look at the all–time list of teams who have won the MLS cup and selected a college team that competes in that same state. If there was more than one MLS team from the same state, I would add another team from the same state. The conference is made up of the following teams: UCLA, George Washington, San Jose State, Washington, Missouri, Ohio State, Utah, Denver, Oregon State, Illinois, Georgia, and LIU. Now obviously, this is a total disaster geographically, so similar to MLS, I divide these teams into the Eastern and Western Divisions to put six in each division. Eastern is made up of George Washington, Ohio State, Illinois, LIU, Georgia, and Missouri. Western will consist of UCLA, San Jose State Washington, Utah, Denver, and Oregon State. In order to qualify to the conference championships, teams will have to place in the top four in their division with the NQS. The final eight teams will be split into an afternoon session and an evening session, with the top four teams being in the evening session. Is it crazy? Yes. Would I be here for every second of it? Absolutely.

Jessica: Eastern Piedmont Conference

Being from the South, I wanted to find something that brought together the areas of the East Coast while properly representing the schools with gymnastics teams. I was originally thinking of something similar to what Katie did with the Mississippi River, but I redirected my thoughts toward areas where the Appalachian Mountains go through as it’s near where I went to college. To keep it localized for the South and lower East Coast, it would consist of Maryland, George Washington, William & Mary, North Carolina, N.C. State, Fisk, Clemson, Georgia, Florida, and Auburn. This is very geographically pleasing and somewhat simple for travel purposes (unlike the current state of the NCAA haha.) I would divide these 10 teams into a North and a South division and have five teams in each. In terms of conference play, I would have the top 3 from each division automatically qualify to conference championships. The two remaining teams from each division would compete in a “play-in” meet, similar to that of regional championships. The winner from each would become the fourth team. From here, I’d format championships like the SEC does now with an early afternoon and evening session, and the highest-ranking teams compete in the evening session. While it is a bit of a mish-mosh of underdogs and usually high NQS teams, I’m totally here for the increased drive for greatness that would come from this and the atmosphere at each meet would be absolutely incredible.

Mariah: The Cool Cat Conference

I’m a firm believer in the idea that conferences should be geographically based, however, I decided to go a completely different route. My conference includes all the DI schools with cat mascots. There are 12 teams total, and the conference would be split into a big cat division and a small cat division. The big cat division would include all the Tigers (LSU, Auburn, Missouri, Clemson, and Towson) as well as the Lindenwood Lions. The small cat division would include the Wildcats of New Hampshire, Kentucky, and Arizona, as well as the BYU Cougars, Pittsburgh Panthers, and Penn State Nittany Lions. Conference championships will be in a tournament-style format. The first day would consist of two quad meets – one for each division – where the bottom four teams based on NQS will compete to finish in the top two in their session and advance to the final day of competition, while the top two teams in each division receive a bye and automatically qualify to the second day of competition. The second day would include two more quad meets where the top overall finisher would be crowned the conference champion or the “coolest cat” if you will. Shockingly, with the exception of BYU and Arizona, this conference isn’t even that geographically unsound in comparison to what we are going to see in the coming years. I think a “top dog” conference would also make a wonderful addition to the NCAA, or maybe a bear-themed or bird-themed conference. The possibilities are endless.

READ THIS NEXT: CGN Roundtable: Conference Realignment

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Article by the editors of College Gym News