If you aren’t a student athlete, you may not be confident in what SLIAC stands for, let alone what it means to be in a conference.
An athletic conference is a group of sports teams from different schools that compete against each other, often within the same region, and may be divided into smaller divisions where top teams advance to higher levels of competition: think regional, state and national championships. You may have heard of The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) this is divided into three divisions based on scholarship allocation. Each division is made up of several conferences for regional league competition. The St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SLIAC) is one of those regional conferences.
The schools within this conference as of 2024 are Blackburn College, Eureka College, Greenville University, Spalding University, Webster University, Westminster College, Fontbonne University and Principia College.
Two schools joined the conference last year, Lyon University and Mississippi University for Women, but MUW is allegedly changing their name to Wynbridge State University. And Fontbonne will be leaving the conference soon, as the school itself is shuttering.
All of Prin’s athletic teams, apart from rugby and tennis, are a part of the SLIAC conference.
Each division has NCAA requirements to be able to participate in the conference based on size and funding, including being able to support a certain number of mens and women’s teams. Division III schools must be able to support at least three team sports per gender across each season. Smaller schools with 1,000 or fewer undergraduates such as Principia, must sponsor five men’s and five women’s sports, while larger institutions must offer six of each.
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