Ferrum’s move to Division II boon for Conference Carolinas, not cause for concern with ODAC

Cleive Adams remembers the glory days of Ferrum College athletics.

When the Panthers’ athletic director played football for the Franklin County institution back in the late 1980s, he helped Ferrum reach the NCAA Division III semifinals twice. Now he will hope to lead them to those heights in Division II. Ferrum believes the shift will open doors for the college to recruit a higher level of student-athletes for its 21 intercollegiate programs, and it took a big step in that direction Friday with the announcement that it will join Conference Carolinas in the 2025-26 academic year.

“The goal is for us to get back to our roots and the foundation of being able to attract that caliber of athletes on our campus consistently,” Adams said, referring to the late 1980s and early ’90s when Ferrum routinely made deep runs in the NCAA tournament in a handful of sports, including football and baseball.

Ferrum has struggled to recruit students, athletes or non-athletes, in the past decade; the college’s enrollment shrank by nearly half from 2014 to this past fall when 775 students came to campus. And so when president Mirta Martin officially assumed her post in the fall, she began to inspect the transition to Division II as the remedy.

“She looked around at the landscape and infrastructure of our institution and immediately started thinking about the idea,” Adams said.

[Read more: Ferrum’s move to Division II is the latest in a string of changes that the college has made to attract students and fight off dwindling enrollment that has plagued it in recent years.]

Division II, unlike Division III, allows institutions to provide athletic aid to students in return for their participation in sports. Other differences distinguish the two subsets of the National Collegiate Athletic Association — a more stringent set of academic compliance standards, the ability for student-athletes to redshirt (sit out a season of competition but remain eligible to practice with their teams), and a regional model of national-tournament competition — but the crux for Ferrum will be the ability to assist student-athletes with the cost of attendance.

Adams, a Radford native who was the school’s head football coach from 2020-23, became the athletic director in December and said he was quickly brought up to speed on the transition exploration.

“Once I was brought into the fold, it pretty much accelerated fairly quickly from there,” Adams said.

Conference Carolinas, which Ferrum will join in 2025 pending NCAA approval of the transition next winter, came into the picture over the winter months, and a contingent from the league performed a campus visit last month with the idea of solidifying the move. The conference liked what it saw in March, according to commissioner Chris Colvin.

“It did not take long for us to bring a site visit team on campus, to meet with individuals on campus, and to meet with President Martin and understand Ferrum’s mission and values, to understand that yes, they are a great fit,” Colvin said.

Ferrum retained a consultant, Strategic Edge, to assist in the exploration and transition processes and “walk us to completion,” Adams said Friday. He said the college paid Strategic Edge between $15,000 and $20,000 for its initial consultation and will continue to use the firm’s services over the next several years while they complete the move. Ferrum will begin playing in Division II in all sports in 2025-26 and will be fully eligible for NCAA championships at that level in 2027-28. Once the move is made, Ferrum will become the fifth Division II institution in Virginia, joining Emory & Henry College, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, Virginia State University and Virginia Union University at that level.

He believes the transition will open doors for Ferrum that closed in the 1990s and 2000s as small colleges throughout the region aggressively expanded their sport offerings to prospective athletes.

“We had small college programs popping up everywhere … so it has spread out the pool of available talent,” Adams said. “[We believe] moving forward as a Division II program that we’re going to open back up the state of Virginia as a destination of choice here at Ferrum College.”

Ferrum has struggled to field teams in some sports recently. The school cut men’s and women’s swimming ahead of the current academic year and scuttled its 2024 men’s lacrosse season due to low participation numbers.

For the conference’s part, Colvin said plugging Virginia into the league’s footprint will be a boon for both Ferrum and the schools that are already members. Conference Carolinas has 15 member institutions currently in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

“Adding Virginia … really makes this a true Southeast region conference,” the commissioner said. “We really had a good perspective of what Ferrum is all about. … There’s a lot about what Ferrum is trying to do to achieve its mission that really aligned well with what Conference Carolinas is trying to do.”

Those qualities include Ferrum’s commitment to “mind, body and soul,” as part of its student-athlete experience, including the college’s affiliation with the United Methodist Church and its high percentage of first-generation college students. (Currently, about 40% of Ferrum’s students are first-generation.) Ferrum also adds a seventh football program into the conference, which had already announced its intention to sponsor the sport beginning in 2025-26.

But where Conference Carolina gains, the Old Dominion Athletic Conference loses. Ferrum left the USA South Athletic Conference for the ODAC in 2018-19 in a move predominantly intended to introduce another football program into the 15-member Division III league based in Forest. The ODAC, which has since lost Emory & Henry to Division II but added Averett University into the fold, will have to adjust its plans following the announcement.

“Clearly there’s some particular reason that they believe Division II is a better fit for this time for them as an institution,” ODAC commissioner Brad Bankston said Friday. “It does create, obviously, scheduling adjustments that will have to be made beginning in the ’25-’26 season, and we’re certainly prepared to make those changes, and we’ll continue to be able to adjust to whatever it is that we need to do moving forward.”

Bankston said that while Ferrum was “very up front” with the league about its exploration of Division II, he has not yet considered whether the league will try to replace its departing member with another Division III institution. 

“We haven’t had a lot of time to process that, but we’ll have ample time to have discussions with the board of directors as well as the presidents as we move forward to determine what our next steps should be,” he said.

One reason the ODAC isn’t panicking is that Roanoke College is adding football; the Maroons hired former Virginia Tech offensive coordinator Brian Stinespring as head coach and are slated to debut on the gridiron in 2025 and will essentially take the place of Ferrum on existing teams’ schedules. Another is the success of the league in national tournaments over recent seasons. University of Lynchburg won national titles in baseball and equestrian last spring, Randolph-Macon won the 2023 men’s basketball championship, and Hampden-Sydney’s men’s basketball team lost in the national title game last month. Several other conference teams — Guilford men’s basketball, Washington and Lee men’s soccer, and Randolph-Macon football — reached the NCAA semifinals in the past year, and several programs claimed individual national titles in various sports. Ferrum saw its men’s basketball, softball and men’s wrestling teams all receive national recognition in recent seasons, though none claimed league championships.

“We have a strong membership that has done a tremendous job with their athletic programs as well as their institutional models and continue to do that within the Division III world in a strong fashion,” Bankston said. “I’m not looking back with the perspective that something’s wrong. I’m looking forward to working with the members that we have as we continue to do great things.”

For Conference Carolinas’ part, recent years have been ones marked by growth. Francis Marion, UNC Pembroke, Young Harris College and Shorter College have all joined the league from other Division II conferences since 2021, bringing the total membership to 15. Ferrum will be the 16th institution in the conference.

“It’s just one additional layer of the fulfillment of lots of years of hard work in the growth of our membership,” said Colvin.

That league has also seen success on the national stage. North Greenville won the Division II baseball championship in 2022, and Conference Carolinas saw multiple teams qualify for NCAA tournaments in several sports last season. The league currently has nationally ranked teams in baseball, men’s golf, women’s tennis and men’s volleyball.

“Our goal right now is to enter the league and stabilize ourselves in the league,” Adams said of Ferrum’s aspirations.

Then, he said, they can explore adding to their sport sponsorship, which currently sits at 21 intercollegiate programs.

“Anything’s possible in terms of additional sport sponsorship once we get our foundation underneath us,” the athletic director added.

Adams isn’t kidding himself, though. There will be challenges. Travel, for one, will be less convenient with Ferrum at the northern terminus of Conference Carolinas’ footprint.

“There’s no substitute for the travel we have in the Old Dominion Athletic Conference,” he said. “That had to be looked at pretty closely as we evaluated this transition. … We’ve taken a strong look at the entire scope of it all, top to bottom.”

Another will be the hiring of a full-time director of NCAA compliance, a requirement at the Division II level. Adams said that job opening was posted within minutes of the announcement Friday afternoon.

The Division II move will also open the doors to rekindled rivalries. Adams said he expects Ferrum and Emory & Henry to take up the Crooked Road Rivalry in football again—the two Southwest Virginia Methodist institutions had a heated rivalry when they were both in Division III—once the move is made, and Conference Carolinas features a few old foes from the school’s junior college days in Lees-McRae and Chowan.

Ferrum’s next step toward Division II membership will be the application to the NCAA next winter.

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Correction 12:05 p.m. April 8: Ferrum College will be the fifth Division II school in Virginia. The tally was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.