Inside West Florida's plan to reclassify to D1

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I have a quick announcement I’d like to share before we get too into the weeds. Beyond writing newsletters and running the Extra Points Library, we also provide classroom curriculum support for sports management and sports business classses. We call that package Extra Points Classroom.

Today, we’re excited to announce another institution participating in that program: Keuka College:

This gives Keuka College students (and teachers!) engaging classroom materials and resources, all for less money than a typical textbook.

To learn more about how Extra Points Classroom can fit in with your instruction or institution, drop me a line at [email protected].

On April 2, the University of West Florida made it official. The school would reclassify to D-I, joining the UAC in football and the ASUN in everything else. The Argonauts will begin D-1 competition quickly, starting this Fall.

The official announcement was certainly a celebratory moment for both UWF and the UAC/ASUN. For the conferences, they get a member with a successful D-II athletic tradition (including a D-II football national championship in 2019), a large enrollment, and an important market. UWF secures conference stability and a league affiliation with institutions that are more similar to what UWF has become. There are plenty of reasons to think that UWF can become a competitive low-major D-I program pretty quickly across multiple sports.

But reclassifying to play D-I athletics in just a few months wasn’t the original plan. Thanks to correspondence obtained by Extra Points via Open Records Requests, and then follow up conversations, we can better understand exactly how this decision came together, why it happened, and how everybody was able to quickly pivot away from the original plan.

UWF’s original plan? Move to D-I next year, in 2027.