Tommies Take Center Stage

KICKED OUT

St. Thomas became a victim of its own success in May of 2019 when it was “involuntarily removed” from the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC), a conference it helped found 99 years prior. The MIAC President’s Council cited “athletic competitive parity” as its primary concern in a statement explaining its decision. 

The Tommies’ football team won seven MIAC championships and was NCAA runner-up twice in its final decade of D-III competition while the women’s hockey team claimed two NCAA Frozen Four appearances, nine MIAC regular season or playoff titles and finished with 20 consecutive winning seasons. St. Thomas’s men’s hockey program ended its Division III tenure with 1,170 wins in 97 seasons, ranking No. 1 all-time among all Division III hockey teams. The Tommies captured 34 MIAC championships, 12 conference playoff titles, made 17 NCAA tournament appearances and earned two NCAA Frozen Four berths (in 2000 and 2005), finishing as runner-up each time.

That’s merely three examples of St. Thomas athletic dominance but far from the only ones leading to it unceremonious ouster from the MIAC. A little more than a year later, on July 15, 2020, the NCAA made the unprecedented decision to allow St. Thomas to became the first Division III athletics program in the modern NCAA era to reclassify straight to Division I. That paved the way for the Tommies’ women’s hockey program to join the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA) that day while the men’s team was accepted into the newly-formed Central Collegiate Hockey Association (CCHA) two weeks later. 

“The move to D-I is really an entire university move. It’s about raising our profile as a university and it’s exciting to be on the national stage,” Sawkar said. “We’re proud of our athletes, all of them, and it really is about showing the nation what the University of St. Thomas is about, and our amazing culture and education.”