SCIAC

One fault of attending Chapman University is the athletics. No it is not the athletics program, or the facilities, or the teams - it is the fact that Chapman University is an independent Division III school. Being an independent school means that we are not in a league. We have to compete with the other 409 schools to earn a spot in the playoffs. The playoffs are what every team fights for – to be the best DIII team in the nation. There are many disadvantages of being an independent college and being on the Women’s Soccer team here at Chapman, I know first hand how frustrating it is to not have maximum opportunities to make it to the playoffs.

To fix this problem I want Chapman to be part of the SCIAC, Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (http://thesciac.org/landing/index) – the league of other DIII schools in this area. In 1915, five Southern California institutions combined to form the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. The purpose of this conference is “promoting and governing competition in intercollegiate sports with the fundamental principle of the conference being to encourage the highest ideals of amateur sports in an environment of high academic standards.” Since the start, the schools have changed and there are now 8 teams: California Institute of Technology, Occidental College, Pomona-Pitzer Colleges, University of Redlands, Whittier College, California Lutheran University, Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Colleges, and University of La Verne. The reason why being in a league is so important is that they have a chance to get an automatic qualifier bid to the playoffs, while we have to hope and pray at the end of the season that they pick our school based off of many factors. I want Chapman to be the 9^th team in the SCIAC to better the league and to better our school. It is not fair that we have to play each game knowing that one loss could ruin our chances of making it to playoffs. I want a change.