By Michael Kelley ’14 and Ben Brown ’14

A Q&A with BU and Loyola

This past Wednesday, Notre Dame left the Big East to join the Atlantic Coastal Conference, highlighting a busy year of conference realignments. The Patriot League has made headlines of their own, welcoming Boston University and Loyola University of Maryland as their ninth and tenth full members.

So what is behind the conference shifts? Why do schools abandon their ties with their founding conferences? This past week, The Lafayette talked to BU Athletic Director Mike Lynch and Loyola AD Jim Paquette. Topics included reasons for the switch, the process behind it, the newly granted Patriot League scholarships, and away game travel plans.

The Lafayette: Why join the Patriot League?

Mike Lynch: It’s a combination of athletic and academic excellence. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for us. The types of schools that we’re going to be competing against in the Patriot League are some of the best in the country and some really great brand name institutions that we are excited to be competing with and standing alongside as one league.

Jim Paquette: I think the first thing for Loyola was the opportunity, for the first time in our Division I history, to have all our sports in one conference. Also we were just incredibly impressed by the academic quality of the institutions in the Patriot League and we just felt the Patriot League’s philosophy was great for Loyola.

The Lafayette: Explain the process behind the switch.

ML: Over the last ten years, Boston University has been investigating, just taking a hard look at our program what we feel we’re about. We had some informal conversations over the past years as the landscape of college sports started to change. Certainly within the last few months that’s when those talks started to get really heated up.

JP: The representative from the Patriot League Council of Presidents came to visit our campus in August. When we entered discussions with [the Patriot League], it was something the more we learned, the more interested we became.

The Lafayette: Did the newly granted Patriot League scholarships play a role in your decision?

ML: We have a variety of different scholarship opportunities for all of our programs, both men and women. And to know that we were going to be able to continue those opportunities, that was certainly a deciding factor for us, yes.

JP: It was important to us that any league that we joined had a strong commitment to women’s athletics. So knowing that the base of the most recent decisions there would be more resources, specifically scholarships, going to the women’s side, was certainly appealing to us.

The Lafayette: In regards to geographic proximity to other schools, how will the switch to the Patriot League affect you?

ML: We’ve played Holy Cross in conference competition for a number of years. We’re hopeful now that we are in the same league together that that might be a signature kind-of-event here in town, particularly when you talk about men’s and women’s basketball.

JP: It’s great for us to have local rivalries for us like Navy and American. Everything but BU and Holy Cross are bus trips for us. Our men’s lacrosse team had to fly 9,000 miles last year for conference games, so the travel is real important for us in terms of the student-athlete experience. It’s going to cut down on missed class and there’s also going to be some cost savings for conference travel.