Wisconsin Soccer Central

UW-Superior was officially accepted as a member of the Upper Midwest Athletic Conference on Monday and will join the Minnesota-based league in the 2015-16 school year, meaning that 2014 will almost certainly be the final season of Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference men's soccer competition.

NCAA standards state that a conference must have five members to sponsor a sport, and with the Yellowjackets' departure, the WIAC will have only four men's soccer teams: UW-Oshkosh, UW-Platteville, UW-Whitewater and Finlandia (Mich.), which joined the conference as an associate member for men's soccer only in 2009.

WIAC commissioner Gary Karner told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last month that if Superior moved to the UMAC, the conference would not seek a replacement. Addtionally, there is no indication that any of the WIAC schools without men's soccer programs are considering adding the sport, and there aren't any other potential associate members in the Upper Midwest.

As several WIAC coaches noted when Superior's potential move came to light, the only major changes without the Yellowjackets in the WIAC will be the elimination of conference championships and all-conference honors.

That's because a league must have seven teams to be eligible for an automatic NCAA Division III tournament berth. Without an automatic bid, WIAC teams essentially are treated like independents when it comes time to distribute postseason spots each fall.

Oshkosh, Platteville and Whitewater are expected to continue to schedule non-conference matches against Superior, which has gone 10-12-2 in the league's first five seasons and won the inaugural WIAC men's tournament last fall.

On the women's side, the WIAC will be reduced to eight teams with the Yellowjackets' departure. However, Superior is 1-163-1 in its 21 seasons in the league and has lost 142 consecutive regular-season conference matches since its lone win back in 1996.

St. Scholastica (Minn.) has the dominant soccer programs in the UMAC.

The Saints have won the past 10 regular-season women's titles and have qualified for the NCAA tournament six times in the past seven years. Their men's team, meanwhile, hasn't lost a regular-season UMAC match since 2009, with a 62-game unbeaten streak (58-0-4) and an 88-3-5 league record over the past seven years.

Superior cited several factors in its decision to change conferences, most notably competitive balance and travel – the latter involving consideration of both finances and missed class time for student-athletes. Their shortest trip for WIAC competition is approximately 2 hours; in the UMAC, most of their trips will be less than 2 hours.

And Superior is easily the smallest school in the WIAC – its enrollment is roughly 2,800, with UW-River Falls the next smallest at 6,800. All of the other seven league members have enrollments of at least 8,000, with three schools above 11,000. In the UMAC, Superior will be the third-largest school, behind St. Scholastica (4,200) and Northwestern-St. Paul (2,900). Three members have enrollments of less than 1,000.

"This really is a bittersweet day for us," Superior athletic director Steve Nelson said in a news release. "On the one hand, we are excited to see what the future holds in becoming part of a new conference, but on the other hand there is some emotion that comes with leaving the only conference we have been a part of.

"Believe me, this isn't a decision that was made lightly or made on a whim. At the end of the day, we had to do what was best for our department. We had to do what was best competitively, financially and institutionally."

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