PRINCESS ANNE, Maryland – After 50 seasons competing in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference the University of Maryland Eastern Shore baseball team will be seeing some fresh teams this coming spring as an associate member of the Northeast Conference.
 
"It'll be refreshing to coaches and players to get out there and play some other opponents," head coach Brian Hollamon said.
 
The move comes after the NCAA allowed a two-year stay for the conference to find an additional two members so the conference champion would still earn an automatic qualifying bid to the NCAA Tournament. Joining the Shore in the NEC will be the three other MEAC schools – Coppin State, Delaware State and Norfolk State – to make it an eleven-team conference.
 
About the Northeast Conference
 
The NEC originated in 1981 as the ECAC Metro conference before becoming its current iteration in 1988 and consists of nine full-time members and eleven affiliate members in various sports. Most recently Long Island University won the NEC baseball regular season and tournament, while Bryant, who left the conference after this season, had been the perennial top team.
 
Since 2008 the Hawks have played just one team that is currently in the NEC, Farleigh Dickinson University to a 3-3 record. Central Connecticut, Merrimack, Wagner and Sacred Heart are also current members of the conference with Stonehill joining making the process to a full-time member for the 2022 school year, its first as a Division I institution.
 
"The year before we shut down for Covid we were going to be playing Bethune-Cookman, Florida A&M, NC Central, NC A&T – so we were going to be rotating back through the whole conference," Hollamon said. "Once Covid hit it stuck us with only playing our northern teams, which was fine, we just played 36 games with the same (three) opponents."
 
Despite the location of many of the schools being in the north, weather was not much of an issue for the NEC in 2022, only having a handful of games moved because of rain or snow and every member playing 27 conference games.
 
"My understanding is they only canceled three games all last year," Hollamon said. "They'll also have some freedom playing down here at Norfolk State, Del State, Coppin and us, it gives them a little bit of a reprieve from being in the cold all the time."
 
Season Changes
 
Moving to the NEC will bring changes for the baseball program in the structure of the schedule and how travel will be conducted with the distance between schools. The longest conference trip for the Hawks in 2022 was a short drive to Norfolk, in 2023 it may be up to seven hours if they are matched at Central Connecticut.
 
"We're going to have some longer rides on the bus," Hollamon said. "I don't I've met anybody that's thought it was a bad idea, talked to a lot of coaches from other conferences and they're excited too."
 
When the MEAC moved down to just four teams, the conference made the decision to go from three-game weekend series to four-game series but with the move to the NEC weekends will return to just three contests per meeting. Having the shorter series opens up the opportunity for both rest days and the option of having Tuesdays as a mid-week.
 
"The three-game series is the right thing because it puts value on each game," Hollamon said. "A lot of times when you're playing four, you're just trying to pack the games into the weekend. (Three games) gives people a chance to recover."
 
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