Rowing team members of two conferences

It's no secret that K-State is a member of the Big 12 Conference for athletic competitions. However, in rowing, the final competition of the year is the Conference-USA Championships in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The question then arises, why does the crew race for both a Big 12 and a C-USA title?

It comes down to the path that all women's crews are taking to get to the NCAA Championships.

Starting in 2013, the NCAA will begin an automatic qualifying process to determine which crews will make the field of 16-teams in the women's rowing championships. The qualifications to make the NCAA Championships beginning then will be an automatic invitation to the winner of a conference with at least six teams. A team must also have been a member of that conference for at least two seasons before it is eligible to be considered for automatic qualification within the conference.

As of right now, the Big 12 only has four varsity women's rowing teams. Many of the schools have club teams, but there are no immediate plans to add two teams to Texas, Oklahoma, K-State and Kansas to make the Big 12 an eligible conference.

"Women's rowing started in 1997 in the NCAA and it's been an emerging sport," said K-State head coach Patrick Sweeney. "Something like only 100 teams have it as a varsity sport, while 200 have it at the club level."

Because the Big 12 will not have enough teams to be eligible for automatic qualification, they teamed up with Conference USA and the South Eastern Conference to form a nine-team conference. In addition to the four teams from the Big 12 and the Tennessee Volunteers from the SEC, C-USA brings the competition of Central Florida, Alabama, Tulsa and Southern Methodist into the mix.

"What we did was we combined all these schools so we could have an affiliated rowing conference that was eligible for automatic qualifiers," Sweeney said. "Because there are a lot of conferences all over the country that only have two or four varsity teams, so they wouldn't be eligible."

The NCAA currently selects the 16-team field by committee, similar to the national basketball tournament. In the future, the committee will still select some teams to fill at-large bids to fill the competition outside of conference winners.

"It was by committee that used to select the teams for the NCAA's," Sweeney said. "They would do it based off these three regional competitions; the Pac-10's, the East Coast Ivy League competition and then a conglomeration competition in the Midwest region."

With four teams, the Big 12 is close to being eligible on their own. However, the two most talented club-level teams in the conference are Nebraska and Colorado, who are bolting for the Big 10 and the Pacific-10 respectively.

"It's really a shame that those two schools are leaving, because they have such great talent," Sweeney said. "To be honest though, I think everybody involved is comfortable with the situation we are in with Conference-USA."