MURFREESBORO, N.C.
When tiny Chowan University moved up to Division II a few years ago, it knew it needed the stability that comes with joining a conference.
So the private, predominantly white Baptist school of about 900 students in northeast North Carolina shopped around for a league for its football program. One by one either because of geography, sport selection or a simple unwillingness to expand several possible homes for the Hawks were cast aside.
Meanwhile, its most unlikely host emerged as the best fit the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association. The nation’s oldest league for historically Black colleges and universities next season will welcome Chowan’s football team.
Call it the colorblind conference.
“We’re being visionaries,” Chowan athletic director Dennis Helsel said. “We’re probably doing something that is not in the mainstream of North Carolina.”
Or, for that matter, in college sports across the country. The first predominantly white college to join a conference typically reserved for historically Black colleges and universities is an unprecedented marriage spurred by location and several CIAA defectors who left for the lower levels of Division I.
