Can someone explain to me how they breakdown the ncaa divison 1 cross country into IA, AA and AAA? Is it by school size? funding? performance? Thank you, I need this for a report and can't find it on google
Can someone explain to me how they breakdown the ncaa divison 1 cross country into IA, AA and AAA? Is it by school size? funding? performance? Thank you, I need this for a report and can't find it on google
Also, one more question.... do college coaches sign a contract? What sort of job security do they have? Is it completely in the hands of the athletic director whether to hire/fire them? And I am asssuming they recieve benefits from the university such as a 401k, healthcare, etc?
Maybe I've completely lost my mind, but there isn't a A, AA, AAA in XC. Division I football has I-A and I-AA based on all sorts of things such as number of funded scholarships. In XC, there are regions in which the top schools automatically make it and then additional wild card teams are accepted based on the number of times they have beaten auto teams.
Yes, as the above poster says, only football has Division I, IA, etc. Cross Country is broken into Divisions I, II, and III. The divisions have to do with school size, number of sports offered, funding, what division the schools WANT to be in, and other factors. Schools can be in different divisions for different sports (i.e. some schools offer Division I hockey or gymnastics or basketball but are Division III for all other sports. The University of Denver used to operate this way, and Colorado College still does.) For more detailed and specific information, I would suggest you go to the NCAA website as opposed to just using Google. Message board conversations and Google searches might be hard to properly cite in a report!
For your questions about coaches, you could try emailing a sampling of athletic directors or the coaches themselves, but I don't know that they would be very responsive.
NCAA DI-A and DI-AA are designations for football only. All other sports it's just DI, DII and DIII. For some sports like Skiing and Men's Volleyball divisional designations are not as meaningful because there's a single NCAA Championship that teams from DI, DII and DIII all compete for. (schools still have to follow the rules for their division in those sports so it's not a completely meanignless designation despite competing for the same trophy). DI-A and DI-AA as subdivisions of DI is going away either next year or the year after to be replaced by the descriptions "Football Bowl Subdivision" and "Football Championship Subdivision", as the current DI-AA schools actually play for an NCAA Championship while the bigger schools have the postseason bowl structure. No practical diffence from what it is now but maybe it will be easier for the general public to understand if they use words instead of roman numerals.
As for college coaches and contracts, it varies by school. Almost all sign a contract, as any college faculy/staff would. Job security varies wildly with some coaching positions having security almost on the level of faculty tenure, and I'm sure some XC/Track coaches have faculty positions that have earned them tenure and that might extend to their coaching duties. Traditional benefits such as health insurance, 403b, also vary although I suspect that the salary levels for most DI XC/Track coaches are high enough to include traditional benefits.
The above posters are mostly right, but not entirely. Division I is broken up into I-A and I-AA for football, while most other sports chanmpionships are simply run according to Divisions I, II and III. But I-A, I-AA and I-AAA are SCHOOL designations, not just sport designations. I-A is comprised of Division I schools with I-A football programs, I-AA is comprised of Division I schools with I-AA football programs, and I-AAA is comprised of Division I programs without football programs. Each division (A, AA, AAA) gets a certain number of votes at NCAA meetings; thus the A/AA/AAA divisions are important for overall NCAA governance purposes and not just for the sport of football.
Incidentally, Division I-AAA has the distinction of being the one NCAA division that has never hosted a championship in any sport. The reason should be self-evident. But I-AAA is still a very important NCAA division, as the I-AAA schools will cast their NCAA governance ballots to suit their own unique interests.
great. thanks for the replies. Anyone know about the coaching benefits for college coaches? I am trying to find this online so I can document my source. Something that describes whether they receive insurance, vacation, sick-leave, etc?