MOORHEAD — Give the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference and the University of Jamestown this: If the league extending an invitation to the school is a "done deal," as seems to be the popular belief in the world of regional small-college athletics, both parties are doing a bang-up job of playing innocent.
They are like Sargent Schultz. They know nothing.
Representatives of the NSIC spent two days at the Jamestown campus this week doing a site visit, what league commissioner Erin Lind calls the discovery phase of the Jimmies' application to join the conference.
Jamestown, currently a member of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, wants to join the NSIC and move up to NCAA Division II. It applied for membership in May. The NSIC is a perfect geographic fit for the Jimmies and would give them a more stable, more comfortable home than their current membership in the Great Plains Athletic Conference.
The GPAC, by the way, booted Jamestown earlier this month in a vindictive, bush-league move. For a league made up of religiously affiliated schools, it wasn't very Christian of them.
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Anyway, if some believe the NSIC and Jamestown are just going through the paces before the North Dakota school becomes the league's 16th member, neither Lind nor Jimmies athletic director Austin Hieb cracked under extreme questioning Friday.
"We felt like things went really well," is all Hieb would say.
Yawn.
"We are studying factual information, not using conjecture, and we will use that factual information to make a thoughtful, strategic decision," Lind said.
Double yawn.
And congratulations on obviously getting an A+ in Commissioner Speak 101 at Southwest Minnesota State back in the day.
If you talk to enough people in Minnesota and North Dakota about this situation, the gamut of beliefs run from believing strongly Jamestown will get an invitation to believing the NSIC has already made up its mind and has worked with the school to get it ready for admittance.
There's nobody yet who's indicated the NSIC is going to stiff-arm Jamestown. And honestly, why would the conference do that? It sits at 15 teams right now, would benefit from getting to 16 and Jamestown sits perfectly in the league's geographic footprint.
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It's kind of a no-brainer.
Lind wouldn't tip the league's hand either way, but said the NSIC contingent did its due diligence while in Jamestown. There were visits with the school president's cabinet, coaches and student-athletes. There were tours of facilities, the campus and the Jamestown community.
"Because of my role, I've been able to study their application in detail for months. I've been able to do that since they applied in May and I've been able to get super-granular," Lind said. "Because presidents and athletic directors of our members have many other things to do, they maybe haven't been able to study things as closely as I have. So this was a good opportunity for others in the league to get to know UJ and to get to learn more about them."
Lind said everything is on track for the NSIC presidents and chancellors to "take action," that's the words she used multiple times, on Jamestown's application before December 1. There will soon be a report on Jamestown's application sent to league members and further discussion in the coming weeks. Then there will likely be a vote around Thanksgiving on whether to invite the Jimmies to the conference.
Jamestown needs a 2/3 vote, 10 of 15 institutions, to get into the league. It would begin play in the fall of 2025.
The closest Lind came to offering a look inside the thinking of the league came when she said this: "In my position, I have the opportunity to talk with leaders of all the other Division II conferences in the country. And in our talks, I hear often about their struggles," Lind said. "And when I hear about the struggles of smaller conferences, it's about scheduling and resources and all the issues that might arise because you're a smaller conference.
"I don't think that's a place our league wants to go."
Done deal? Maybe not. But if you had to bet a sack of money on whether Jamestown was going to get into the NSIC, the affirmative might be the stronger play.
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