The athletic program at St. Joseph’s College seems to be on the move.
The private liberal arts school, located on the shore of Sebago Lake in Standish, has a new athletic director and will be joining the Great Northeast Athletic Conference (GNAC) and increasing the number of sports teams offered to students.
“We’ve talked a lot about getting our name out there in Maine, New England and beyond,” said Brian Curtin, who took over the athletic director post in May. “It’s a challenge.”
St. Joe’s, a Division III program, currently offers 11 teams: men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s cross country, baseball, softball, field hockey, women’s volleyball and men’s golf.
A year from now the school will compete in the GNAC and add men’s and women’s lacrosse as well as co-ed swimming to the varsity program. Swimming has been a club-level activity and will continue that designation this year.
Curtin said that he and the other administrators who worked on the expansion of athletics agreed to “do it right” and not rush into varsity programs without working out the details, especially before hiring new coaches.
“I didn’t want to guess about numbers and schedules,” he said. “I’d like for the coaches to come in and make those decisions.”
Curtin also said that the conference selected by the school seems like the right fit for St. Joe’s.
“We all felt that the GNAC allowed us to be with more similar institutions,” he said. “And Joe Walsh, the commissioner, has a nice long-range plan for a competitive conference and for new sports to be added.”
This will be the first full NCAA conference affiliation for St. Joe’s, though for the past two years the Monks’ baseball team has been an associate member of the Northeast Athletic Conference, winning the league championship twice and reaching the NCAA tournament this past season.
The other teams in the GNAC are Albertus Magnus College (New Haven, CT), Daniel Webster College (Nashua, NH), Emerson College (Boston, MA), Emmanuel College (Boston, MA), Johnson & Wales University (Providence, RI), Lasell College (Newton, MA), Mount Ida College (Newton, MA), Norwich University (Northfield, VT), Pine Manor College (Chestnut Hill, MA), Rivier College (Nashua, NH), St. Joseph College (West Hartford, CT), Simmons College (Boston, MA), Southern Vermont College (Bennington, VT), Suffolk University (Boston, MA).
“We’ve been an independent for so long,” said Curtin, “and all the teams are excited about the automatic berths to the national tournaments that conferences have.”
Curtin, 40, is originally from upstate New York. He has been a part of several Division III basketball coaching staffs, including Manahattanville College, where he was the head men’s hoop coach for nine years.
St. Joe’s, founded in 1912 by the Sisters of Mercy, has an undergraduate enrollment of about 1,000 students.
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