Since arriving in the NCAA, Covenant College has been a member of three intercollegiate athletic conferences. The first was the now defunct Great South Athletic Conference, which was followed by a short period of independence before joining the USA South Athletic Conference.
Covenant was a member of the USA South from 2013–2022. In 2022 the membership of the USA South had reached 19 schools. In 2022 nine of the schools in the geographic west of the conference mutually split with the USA South to form the Collegiate Conference of the South (CCS).
Initially the membership of the CCS was composed of Covenant, Berea, Piedmont, LaGrange, Maryville, Huntingdon, Belhaven, Agnes Scott, and Wesleyan. Agnes Scott and Wesleyan are both women’s-only institutions, bringing the total number of teams in the conference to 7 for men’s sports and 9 for women’s, enough to fill out a fairly robust and competitive schedule every year with opportunities to potentially expand in the future.
However, the first domino fell following the 2023–24 school year when Berea left the conference. The CCS was able to quickly bring in Asbury, who had just finished its transition from the NAIA, to hold conference membership steady. Less than two years later, both Maryville and Wesleyan announced their intent to leave the conference following the 2025–26 season, and this time there was no school to replace either departing member. This dropped CCS membership to 6 for men’s sports and 7 for women’s.
The CCS, while on the smaller side, is still of a comparable size to many NCAA DIII conferences. The largest drawback to having a smaller conference is the risk of losing automatic qualification to NCAA tournaments by winning the conference championship. The lower limit for these is 6 member institutions. All it takes is one domino to fall, and then the question becomes, who does the CCS add to stay afloat?
That question was answered on October 20 when Maryville announced that they would be rejoining the CCS for the 2027–2028 athletic season. Reasons for their return following such a short stint away haven’t been given yet, but their return gives the CCS an extra leg to stand on. Maryville’s return demonstrates the quality of athletics in the CCS and that maybe the grass isn’t as green as it may have seemed.