NCAA Division III

In a feature unique to D-III, the total number of required sports varies with each school's full-time undergraduate enrollment.

[3] Student-athletes cannot redshirt as freshmen,[4][5][6] and schools may not use endowments or funds whose primary purpose is to benefit athletic programs.

[7] D-III schools "shall not award financial aid to any student on the basis of athletics leadership, ability, participation or performance".

As an example of how seriously the NCAA takes this rule, in 2005 MacMurray College became only the fifth school slapped with a "death penalty" after its men's tennis program gave grants to foreign-born players.

Ten D-III schools currently field Division I programs in one or two sports, one maximum for each gender.

The State University of New York at Oneonta, which had been grandfathered in men's soccer, moved totally to D-II in 2006.

In August 2011, the NCAA decided to no longer allow individual programs to move to another division as a general policy.

[16][17][18] D-III membership voted in January 2022 to extend the grandfather clause to allow all ten colleges to offer athletic scholarships, effective immediately.

This led directly to the creation of the Pioneer Football League, a non-scholarship football-only Division I FCS conference.

In 2003, concerned about the disparity of some D-III athletic programs and the focus on national championships, the D-III Presidents' Council, led by Middlebury College President John McCardell, proposed ending the athletic scholarship exemptions for D-I programs, eliminating redshirting, and limiting the length of the traditional and non-traditional seasons.

[20] At the January 2004 NCAA convention, an amendment allowed the exemption for grandfathered D-I athletic scholarships to remain in place, but the rest of the reforms passed.