Four new schools have been added to the Heart of America Athletic Conference; Grand View and William Penn will join Baker and the other HAAC teams starting the 2015-2016 school year. Clarke University and Mount Mercy will begin their time in the conference the following year.

There are currently 10 institutions competing in the HAAC. By the 2016- 2017 school year the number will significantly grow to 14.

With new teams in the conference there will be new challenges facing Baker’s athletic teams.

“Since these teams are unfamiliar, my soccer and track teammates and I, we will have to get familiar with their tactics and their athletes,” sophomore Tyler Sliva said. “With more teams, the competition in the HAAC will be that much more difficult.”

Clarke University and Mount Mercy, the most recently added schools, were approved to join the conference at the April 2015 HAAC Council of Presidents Meeting.

The process of adding a school to the conference requires planning. An institution that is interested in joining first has to fill out a formal application and submit it to the commissioner’s office. Then, those applications are discussed among the athletic directors and faculty athletic representatives from each institution, which occurs at the annual HAAC Board of Governors meeting. Here, the presidents of member colleges make the final decision of whether or not an institution will join the conference when they meet for the HAAC council presidents’ meeting.

“I believe the Heart of America Athletic Conference is the strongest NAIA conference in the nation,” Director of Athletics Theresa Yetmar said. “We have always discussed expansion as a possibility if it was able to strengthen our conference and offer more opportunities for participation for our student-athletes.”

There are many ways Baker athletics will benefit from the expansion of the HAAC; Baker athletes look forward to the new competition.

“I think it will benefit the softball team in the fact that it will give us the opportunity to see new players and face a wider range of competition in our conference,” sophomore Sloane Brady said.

Another benefit is that several conference sports will receive an additional automatic bid to NAIA nationals. Yetmar believes this could help recruiting for the university.

“By expanding our geographic footprint, we will enter recruiting markets that may have been unavailable to us before,” Yetmar said. “Some of our sports programs that were struggling to gain an automatic bid to nationals will transfer to automatic conference qualification.”