On Tuesday June, 10, the Coastal Athletic Association (CAA) — the conference Stony Brook calls home in all 16 of its varsity sports — announced that it will be adopting a divisional format in four sports starting this fall.
With the change, men’s and women’s soccer, softball and baseball will all be transitioning to a system that splits the existing CAA into two divisions: the North and the South. The two primary impacts of the division involve postseason selection and regular-season scheduling.
“The bottom line here is that we are always looking for ways to remain both sustainable and competitive in what I consider to be a new era of college athletics,” CAA commissioner Joe D’Antonio said in an interview with The Statesman. “We’re always looking for different ways in which there can be efficiencies in the way that we’re operating, and our athletic directors have decided that the changes mentioned in the press release are what’s appropriate for the conference right now.”
Stony Brook will be a member of the North Division, along with Northeastern, Hofstra, Monmouth and Towson.
Conversely, the South Division will consist of William & Mary, Campbell, North Carolina A&T (N.C. A&T), Hampton, Charleston, Elon and the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Another change to the conference is the absence of Delaware. The Blue Hens are set to make the move to Conference USA.
Starting in the fall of 2025, both men’s and women’s soccer will send the top three teams from each division to the six-team conference playoffs. The system is a bit more complicated in the diamond-sports, as each division receives two automatic bids to the six-team tournaments in baseball and softball.
For softball, the final two spots — which D’Antonio referred to as “wild cards” — will be awarded to the two teams with the best conference winning percentage that did not receive an automatic spot.
In baseball, the two teams with the best Rating Percentage Index (RPI) that did not crack the the top two of their division, based on NCAA rankings, will both get wild card berths. In this scenario, Stony Brook would have made the CAA postseason tournament despite finishing eighth overall, thanks to it ranking fifth in RPI in the conference.
The other major area that will be impacted is scheduling and travel. With the conference now relatively localized for much of the season, travel costs will likely decrease.
“I’ve used the word ‘efficiency’ three or four times, and I think [travel] is truly what we mean by efficiency,” D’Antonio said. “Within these new models, there are definitely some additional travel efficiencies for all institutions.”
Despite breaking the conference into two divisions, women’s soccer, softball and baseball will still feature crossover games between the North and South. Each team’s schedule in women’s soccer will feature five matches against teams within their division and four games from the other division to make up a nine-game CAA slate.
Softball and baseball will both play predominantly within their own divisions, with teams getting two matchups per year against teams from the opposite division. This system allows for more games against a given school. In Stony Brook’s case, softball will face two of its four divisional opponents once, while getting two series against the remaining two northern teams.
Baseball is much simpler, as each northern school will get two series per season against each northern opponent. For softball and baseball, two teams that meet more than once in the regular season will each get a series at home.
Men’s soccer is the only sport of the four that is abiding strictly to the regional scheduling. Each team will face its four divisional rivals twice, making for an eight-game conference schedule.
“There’s really only one sport that is a true divisional regular season and that is men’s soccer,” D’Antonio said. “All the other formats still have crossover games; they’re just playing more games within their division.”
The CAA has been rumored to be regionalized since four-team expansion, which welcomed Stony Brook, N.C. A&T, Hampton and Monmouth in 2022. Nonetheless, this change does not appear to be a tease at future expansion into other sports across the conference.
“I don’t necessarily see this as a testing ground per se,” D’Antonio said. “I see this as a case-by-case decision for each sport. Every sport is looked at by our [athletic directors] as an entity to itself, and we’re trying to make decisions that are in the best interest of that sport.”
For Stony Brook, the new format will be in action this fall, with both soccer teams starting their respective 2025 campaigns. No schedules have been published at the time of writing.
