In February 2024, UMass announced its decision to make the move from the Atlantic 10 Conference to the Mid American Conference for the 2025-2026 school year. This decision came as a surprise for many, given that the MAC’s member schools are concentrated primarily in Ohio and Michigan, with the only exceptions being schools in New York, Indiana, and Illinois. As a first-year student-athlete just getting to know UMass and the A10, I was left wondering what implications this transition would have for teams like mine.
I wanted to get a pulse check on what others were thinking about this decision, so I decided to pose a survey to student-athletes. This survey asked four simple questions: 1) What gender division do you compete for? 2) What team are you a part of? 3) How would you describe your feelings about UMass’s transition to the MAC next year? (rate on a scale of 1-5, 1 = completely negative, 5 = completely positive) and 4) What else do you have to say about UMass’s transition to the MAC? (long answer). I posted QR codes around the Boyden Athletic Department building and had my Student-Athlete Advisory Committee representative share the survey with the other SAAC reps.
The 22 responses to my survey were made up of 10 female athletes and 12 male athletes. The sports represented in these results were Men’s and Women’s Cross Country/Track and Field, Women’s Rowing, and Men’s Baseball. Interestingly enough, the largest percentage of student athletes (45.5% or 10 student-athletes) felt completely neutral about UMass’s move to the MAC, rating it a 3 on the scale of 1-5. Four student-athletes answered 1 or “completely negative,” two answered 2 or “somewhat negative,” four answered 3 or “somewhat positive,” and two answered 5 or “completely positive”.
In the long answer portion of this survey, there were a wide variety of responses. However, a lot of the athletes expressed annoyance that this move “is going to benefit some teams and others are going to be set backwards in their growth”. This perceived choice of prioritizing certain teams over others understandably made a lot of student-athletes very angry, one respondent simply writing “Thanks football.”
(Unfortunately, I was not able to get a football player’s perspective on this).
Some athletes expressed concerns about the level of competition in the MAC compared to the A10, stating “The A10 is an unbelievably competitive conference and offers student athletes the opportunity to play at the highest level. Moving to the MAC would…lower the competitiveness” and other similar sentiments. They also commented on the geographic differences between UMass and the other MAC teams, some noting “curiosity” and others “worry”. They referenced weather differences, heavier travel for athletes, and decreased opportunities for local parents to watch their children compete as reasons for concern.
However, there were positive takes on the situation as well. Responses pointed to things like, “more money into athletic department and more money to teams,” and better “visibility as a university”. A rowing athlete commented that their “competition is maybe decreased, which isn’t ideal but it does mean we have a better chance at competing at higher level competitions like NCAAs”. Still, many student-athletes agree that they “just hope football does better so it makes it worth wile for all of us other sports”.
It seems important to address how this transition may impact male and female athletes differently. If football is the main sport that is going to be positively affected, does that mean that female sports will be left by the wayside? Interestingly enough, the female athletes at UMass seemed to have similar feelings about this as the male (non-football) athletes. The percentage of survey ratings from 1-5 remained almost exactly the same when the male athletes’ responses were taken out (large concentration of 3s with some higher and lower rankings mixed in)–although none of the female respondents indicated they felt “completely positive” about it. So while many of the athletes who responded to my survey felt unsure about the decision, the female athletes skewed marginally more skeptical.
Many UMass student-athletes say this decision was made with a heavy bias towards football. But does that mean that there will be decreased benefits for other teams going forward? Is UMass’s decision to move to the MAC a net positive or negative for student-athletes? It’s hard to tell as of yet. I, for one, am keeping my eyes peeled to see how this all plays out–on and off the field.
Can’t get enough of HC UMass Amherst? Be sure to follow us on Instagram, listen to us on Spotify, like us on Facebook, and read our latest Tweets!