When James Madison joined the Sun Belt Conference last July, there were three sports that the league didn’t sponsor and the Dukes did — field hockey, swim and dive and women’s lacrosse.

In a perfect world for JMU Athletic Director Jeff Bourne, all of the Dukes’ sports programs would fall under the same conference umbrella, but for the Dukes, it didn’t work out that way.

Though that was the case, it didn’t take long for Bourne to find swim and dive and lacrosse new homes within the Coastal Collegiate Sports Association and the American Athletic Conference, respectively, for this past season. Field hockey spent last season as an independent, but it will join the Mid-American Conference in 2024.

But one of those sports, swim and dive, will find a new home once again, this time under the same governing conference as the rest of the athletic department in the Sun Belt.

The conference is expected to add swim and dive and it will become the 13th different sport that the Sun Belt sponsors for the upcoming 2023-2024 school year, Bourne said in a virtual media availability on Friday afternoon.

Swim and dive would be the second new sport added by the Sun Belt in the past two years after it founded a beach volleyball league, which played its inaugural season this past spring.

The path to this moment has been almost a year’s worth of work by the conference to see how viable a swim and dive league would be. Bourne said it was Sun Belt Commissioner Keith Gill who started the dialogue about adding swim and dive and it’s been a work in progress since then.

It’s not a done deal quite yet, but Bourne was optimistic that the Sun Belt is close to adding swim and dive for the approaching school year.

“I do feel like, given the amount of effort that we’ve put into it, that the league is still committed to doing it for the fall,” Bourne said. “But we’ll know here in the coming month the exact timeline on it.”

The Sun Belt’s swim and dive league would be beneficial for many in the conference since four of the universities in the league already sponsor women’s swim and dive: Georgia Southern, Marshall, Old Dominion and JMU.

And it might not have happened before the conference’s realignment last summer, which added JMU, Marshall, Old Dominion and Southern Miss since Georgia Southern was the only Sun Belt athletic department that had a team.

But after adding three universities with the sport already up and running, it became more feasible.

Of the four programs that sponsor the sport, Georgia Southern, ODU and JMU all compete in the CCSA together, while Marshall is a member of Missouri Valley Conference.

In this season’s CCSA championships in Knoxville, Tenn., JMU placed second, while Georgia Southern came in seventh and ODU finished eighth of the 11 teams in the meet. Marshall placed sixth in the MVC Championship, which was hosted by Northern Iowa in February.

JMU’s swim and dive team was dominant during its time in the Colonial Athletic Association, as it won four straight CAA titles from the 2017-18 campaign through its final year of postseason eligibility in the league during the 2020-21 season.

When the Dukes were barred from the CAA Championships during the 2021-22 season, JMU placed first at the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference Championships for the team’s fifth straight league crown under coach Dane Pedersen.

This past season’s second-place finish at the CCSA Championships was the first time JMU didn’t win a conference crown since its five consecutive second place CAA showings from the 2012-13 season until the 2016-17 year.

Although its new league will feature three of its competitors from JMU’s lone season in the CCSA, it won’t be just a four-team league.

Bourne said the goal would be to have six schools in the inaugural swim and dive league, so the Sun Belt would need to add at least two affiliate members from outside conference’s to create a well-rounded league.

Affiliate members are common among Olympic sports leagues in college sports and the Dukes have benefitted from them with field hockey and lacrosse in the MAC and AAC since JMU moved from the CAA, which sponsored all of the university’s sports programs.

But the affiliate members in swim and dive are expected to help strengthen the Sun Belt’s inaugural season.

“One thing that we look at in all sports, most individual sport programs all have affiliate members from other leagues,” Bourne said. “So, it is something that’s accepted here in collegiate sports and it’s one where we look at it as sort of helping to level the playing field.”