Trinity and Southwestern joining conference as full members in 2025
Will Hoogendyk IV, Campus Carrier sports editor
This fall, Berry will begin to feel the effects of the conference realignment trend that has been sweeping collegiate athletics for the past four years. With Birmingham-Southern College (BSC) shutting down after the 2023-24 academic year, the Southern Athletic Association (SAA) saw its membership drop from eight to seven. In the next two years, the SAA will see that number dip to six before rising to eight, then increasing to nine before the fall of 2026.
At the conclusion of the current school year, Hendrix College, a founding member of the SAA will return to the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) where they previously competed from 1992 to 2012. Hendrix’s departure will leave the SAA with its smallest number of schools since its inception, but only for a few months.
Athletic Director Angel Mason explained that the SAA had been in the market for new conference members as BSC’s situation became clearer.
“It’s a conference addition [and] subtraction type of deal,” Mason said. “There was turmoil for a couple of years with Birmingham Southern and BSC sponsored the vast majority of sports that we sponsored as a conference. When you lose a conference member that is a full sponsoring member, that’s a problem. It obviously began to make people think about ‘How could we expand?’”
Like Berry, of the 21 sports that the SAA sponsors, BSC competed in all of them except women’s field hockey. Losing a school that competes in that many sports hurts the chances for other conference members to compete in NCAA postseason play.
“Your conference is required to have a minimum number of schools that sponsor a given sport if they want to have access to the automatic qualifier [for] the national championship,” Mason said.
Not having an automatic qualifier spot makes it much more difficult for any team to earn a spot in the national championship tournament. Giving student athletes the best opportunity to play in the postseason was a motivating factor in deciding which teams to invite into the SAA.
In the fall of 2025, Trinity University (TX) and Southwestern University will transition from football-only affiliate members of the SAA to full-time members of the conference. Trinity and Southwestern have been football affiliates with the SAA since 2017 and 2023 respectively, competing in the SCAC for all other sports. With both of these schools joining the conference, it will ensure the status of the SAA among Division III conferences.
“It’s very important that we make sure we secure sports sponsorship for all of our programs, so that we give our student athletes the most opportunity towards postseason,” Mason said. “We don’t want to limit ourselves because we don’t have enough schools in our conference. I always want Berry to win, but [it is] equally as important that I’m taking part in conversations and making decisions that make sure that if Berry is successful, our student athletes have access to the next level to succeed in what collegiate athletics has to offer them.”
While having more teams in the conference ensures that Berry will be provided an automatic qualifier for sports if they win the conference, their road to the postseason still won’t be easy. Last year, Trinity placed 22nd in the final standings for the Division III Learfield Director’s Cup—an annual ranking of colleges based on the success of their athletic department.
Trinity and Southwestern stood out as candidates for expansion because of how they lined up with other SAA schools in academic rigor and athletic success.
“You want to look at longevity if you’re going to expand,” Mason said. “Trinity and Southwestern have a long history as a healthy institution, forget sports. And then you add into that they’ve been competitive athletically as well.”
With enrollment cliffs becoming an increasing concern for colleges, Berry’s presence in Texas may help alleviate some of those pressures.
“We know there’s going to be a lower number of students that are graduating from high school,” Mason said. “Having access to compete and be visible in a state like Texas that is still growing and going the opposite direction of the majority of the states [is] an important thing for the longevity of our access as an institution, athletics, just helps with that.”
Adding to the longevity of the conference is Maryville College, whose football and women’s golf programs will join the SAA with both Texas schools in the fall before receiving full membership at the start of the 2026-27 school year.
The one downside to Trinity and Southwestern’s membership is the travel time it will now require from Berry and other SAA schools. According to saa-sports.com, the closest school to these two teams is Millsaps College at more than 500 miles from both institutions. The addition of two schools that are considerably farther away than others will most likely lead to shifts in the way in-conference matchups are held going forward.
“Teams will try and plan road trips where they play both colleges for a conference game,” Mason said. “Every sport will do it a little bit differently. Some sports will go to Texas [and] play both [then] come home and vice versa, where a Texas school would come here, depending on the sport, play us and Oglethorpe and then go home. Some other sports will be what we call a pod system, where you might travel to Texas once, but you’re going to play three or four conference schools in one weekend, but then you might turn around in another two weeks and host somewhere between three and six schools.”
Along with the number and locations of schools in the SAA, the conference championship bid process is also set to change in the fall.
“We are moving our championships to a bid process,” Mason said. “Currently we are an ‘all-in’ tournament, [where] everybody within the SAA has an opportunity at the conference championship. We will not be like that moving forward. We are in the middle of a bid process that will work just like the NCAA National Championship process works where we bid out for four years at a time.”
This bid process will start this fall when Trinity and Southwestern join, but sports with time-based qualifications like swim and dive or cross country won’t be affected. Schools won’t be required to put in bids for tournaments but can only be chosen as a championship site if they put in a bid. Depending on the sport, some tournaments might only allow 6 or 7 schools in to further increase the competitive level of the conference. Inspiration was drawn from the National Championship bid process to make every effort to give Berry and the SAA more prominence in Division III.
Berry’s football team already got a taste of this heightened level of competition when they lost to Maryville 16-20 in the first round of the DIII Football National Championship Tournament in 2024. The Vikings will get a chance for revenge when they play the Scots for the first time as SAA opponents in Mount Berry, Ga., on Nov. 8, 2025.