This occurred after the Division II Membership Committee accepted the institution's application during a July 7–9 meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Simon Fraser, located in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, British Columbia, began a two-year candidacy period September 1, 2009.
In the fall of 2012, the NCAA President's Council officially approved Simon Fraser University as the organization's first international member.
[8] At the time, Centro de Enseñanza Técnica y Superior (CETYS), which is fully accredited in both the U.S. and Mexico, was seeking to become the first Mexican school to join the NCAA with the backing of the California Collegiate Athletic Association.
Each festival has formal opening and closing ceremonies, and competitors are housed in a centrally located hotel, allowing a village-like experience.
For sports other than football and basketball there are no scheduling requirements, as long as each contest involves full varsity teams.
Many Division II student-athletes pay for school through a combination of scholarship money, grants, student loans and employment earnings.
Traditional rivalries with regional institutions dominate schedules of many Division II athletics programs.
[16][a] Second, a first-time transfer does not have to sit out a year, provided that the player's former institution grants a scholarship release.
The Mountain East was approved by the NCAA Division II Membership Committee in February 2013, and became an official conference on September 1 of that year.
[25] A more recent change saw the Great Northwest Athletic Conference (GNAC) drop football after the 2021–22 school year.
Over time, the GNAC saw most of its football-playing schools drop the sport, and it entered into a football scheduling alliance for 2020 and 2021 with the Lone Star Conference (LSC).
[28] The NCAA imposes limits on the total financial aid each Division II member may award in each sport that the school sponsors.
Examples of sports with identical scholarship numbers in the two divisions, but separate national championships for each, include men's cross-country and women's rowing.
Many Division II schools frequently schedule matches against members of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), which consists of colleges and universities that offer athletic scholarships similar to NCAA Division II across the United States and Canada.
They promote competitive and character-based athletics that is controlled by its NAIA membership, as opposed to the NCAA that serves as a regulating body.
In basketball, where conference tournaments play a large role in determining postseason participants, D-I schools have less of a penalty for scheduling an occasional D-II opponent, resulting in more "money games".
In any event, the D-II school is almost invariably the visiting team, and is invited to play with the knowledge that it will likely be defeated but will receive a substantial (at least by Division II standards) monetary reward which will help to finance much of the rest of the season and perhaps other sports as well.
In recent years, "money games" in men's basketball have also included preseason exhibitions against D-I programs, typically in the same region, that do not count in official statistics for either team.
[36] The University of Kansas helps the state's four Division II members by rotating them onto the Jayhawks' exhibition schedule annually.
In 2012, another Division II team beat[37] eventual Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season and tournament champion Miami.
[38] Also in basketball, one of the best-known early-season tournaments for D-I men's teams, the Maui Invitational, is hosted by D-II member Chaminade.