Written by: John FX Flynn, row2k

On Friday, January 16, D2 delegates at the NCAA Convention approved a proposal to exempt the D2 NCAA Rowing Championship from the division's 35-school minimum requirement. As a result, the championship for D2 women's rowers will continue, after spending the last two years facing the prospect of elimination in 2027 after a 2024 rule change.

Since only 14 of the nearly 300 D2 schools have rowing, and these legislative proposals must pass with a majority of voting schools in favor, getting the exemption to pass involved an intensive effort by D2 rowing coaches and administrators to raise awareness and gather support amongst the more than 280 schools in D2 that do not sponsor Women's Rowing.

The win for the proposal effectively restores the exemption that D2 Rowing lost in the 2024 Convention vote that set the bar for championship sponsorship at 35 schools for all sports in the division, without the Olympic sports carve-out which allowed the D2 Rowing Championship to begin in 1997, when the NCAA elevated Women's Rowing to Championship status.

According to Matt Weise, the head coach at Cal Poly Humboldt, the push to put the proposal forward started with the commissioner of the Great Northwest Athletic Conference (GNAC), Bridget Johnson Tetteh.

The GNAC is home to the Cal Poly Humboldt, Central Oklahoma, Seattle Pacific, and Western Washington rowing programs, all perennial NCAA contenders with 15 D2 Championship titles between them.

In addition, Weise said, "There was an AD group, with Rachel Burleson from Emory Riddle [and] Nick Pettit, my AD, and they helped get the legislation piece on to the docket for this year's convention. They were instrumental in getting that moving."

The D2 coaches then played a major role in lobbying ahead of the vote, but a key element that strengthened the proposal came from the administrators, who realized that D2 Field Hockey, with just 37 schools, was also close to the threshold.

"If we include them as well in this legislation, we have more than one conference putting this forward, and that helps," Weise said, of the thinking behind the move to bolster the proposal.

Interestingly, the GNAC, where the push to save the D2 Rowing Championships started, does not even have Field Hockey, but by connecting with the Northeast-10 Conference, the group had two conferences co-sponsoring the proposal--and the push to save Rowing picked up another block of schools and conferences invested in seeing the proposal succeed for the sake of safeguarding Field Hockey as well.

From there, Weise said, "A lot of the coaches jumped in. We did a big lobbying effort. It was great and we built a nice community within the coaching group.
 

Cal Poly Humboldt celebrates on the podium after receiving National Runner-Up at the 2025 NCAA DII Rowing Championships

"We put together a document and then we emailed and called, just to get the word out," he explained, "because most schools don't have Rowing or Field Hockey but they all have a vote.

"We emailed Senior Women's Administrators and compliance officers, then we did some Athletic Directors towards the end. Our ADs signed up to call other ADs to lobby as well. It was a concerted effort."

Part of those conversations was an effort to encourage yes votes, but Weise noted that even creating awareness about the reasons behind the proposal proved important.

In each interaction, he said, "We were just curious what [their] take was on this. This is why we think you should vote 'Yes.' We would love a yes vote, or at least an abstention.

"A lot of schools, if they don't have the sport, will just abstain, but we wanted to make sure that was going to happen to have enough yes votes."

In the end, the number of yes votes was "substantial," according to Weise, and far more that just the fifty or so schools with Rowing or Field Hockey teams directly impacted, thanks to the lobbying effort.

While the vote total was not included in the NCAA press release announcing the results, Weise characterized it as "a fairly sizable yes to no vote," and noted that even the schools which abstained helped the proposal get the majority it needed to pass.

Weise said he felt that most compelling argument in his conversations was the fact that the D2 rowing and field hockey teams that do exist provide a large number of opportunities at their schools.

"These are big female teams for these institutions. They're big roster sizes, and they're big components to their athletic departments.

"People didn't want to see that go away and have these sports removed just because of a simple rule change that happened a few years ago," he explained.

Many of the schools Weise and his fellow coaches contacted did not necessarily have a sense of the roster sizes or number of athletes being affected.

"That's where some of the lobbying came in," he noted. It allowed the rowing and field hockey supporters to talk about how important the proposal was, and to say, as Weise put it, "This is why it's so important to the schools that have these sports."

Weise said his student-athletes, who were just coming back to campus as the vote was announced, feel relieved, especially the younger ones who will now get a chance to compete towards a championship in 2028.

"The sophomores and the freshmen said, 'Oh, thank goodness.' They want to keep going."

Weise sees an even bigger silver lining to the fact that the D2 Championship will continue: the chance to add more rowing schools in D2 now that the championship will remain in place.

"From a growth perspective, if we didn't have a championship, there's no way we're going to add teams. We going to do nothing but lose teams," he said. "Now, it gives us an opportunity to try to get people to add rowing, because there's a path to a championship immediately. We don't have to wait till we get to 35 schools, we already have one. So that's another selling point for us.

"The piece for me that I would like to take the next step with is to see if we can get some more people to add. But again, without a championship, there was no way we were going to make that sale. Now, hopefully, we can."