St. Thomas has received approval to reclassify to Division I, the school announced on Wednesday.
A longtime Division III stalwart, the Tommies are the first Division III athletics program to move straight from D3 to Division I under the modern NCAA rules. The process required a special waiver from the NCAA. Without the waiver from the NCAA, a reclassification from D3 to D1 usually requires more than a decade’s time and a stop in Division II along the way.
In the spring of 2019, St. Thomas was involuntarily removed from the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, a move that the conference justified by citing “athletic competitive parity” in the league. The Tommies had been one of seven founding members of the MIAC.
Eligible to continue competition in the MIAC through the end of the 2020-21 academic year, the Tommies will then join the Summit League for nineteen of their twenty-two sponsored sports, including softball.
As with any school that transitions from a lower Division up to D1, the Tommies will have provisional Division I membership status for four years before being eligible for postseason competition beginning with the 2025-26 academic year.
One of the top programs in Division III over the last two decades, the Tommies’ softball program owns two national championships under head coach John Tschida. A 2016 inductee into the NFCA Hall of Fame, Tschida is the winningest coach in Division III softball history, owning more than 977 career victories with nearly 800 of them coming at the helm of the St. Thomas program. The Tommies won back-to-back national championships in 2004 and 2005.
