The Colonial Coast and the NEWCRC conferences will be combining forces to create the North Atlantic Collegiate Conference.
The thinking behind this move is multi-fold.
1. These two conferences, despite being multi-divisional and both men and women, overlap geographically. Both conferences are almost entirely in NEw England, and there are cases of teams that travel to games and pass colleges in the other conference on the way.
2. Teams are looking for competitive games. Both teams that win big and teams that lose big want and need games that are more competitive.
3 Joining forces will help organization and grow the game.
"We wanted to balance out the competition," said Colonial Coast Commissioner Keith Cattanach. "We get calls from teams that are struggling to compete, but we also are working with teams that are looking for tougher competition. We had some conversations with NEWCRC about how we balance this out."
"We've collaborated with the Colonial Coast since our inception," said Chris St. Onge, NEWCRC administrator who heads up the League Expansion Sub-Committee. "We've had a strong working relationship for close to a dozen years. We had cross-conference bowl games and collaborated with them and Rugby Northeast in an all-star competition before 7s kind of took over in the spring. So we know one another, and we have bounced ideas off one another all the time."
The conferences have similar challenges, including helping teams pull themselves out of COVID numbers crunches or simply helping newer teams grow.
In addition, said Cattanach, there is a desire for more regional competition. So collaboration between NEWCRC and Colonial Coast divisions, as well as other conferences, is on the horizon as well.
