The South Atlantic Conference (SAC) is a college athletic conference affiliated with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at the Division II level, which operates in the southeastern United States.

The league currently sponsors 10 sports for men (football, cross country, soccer, basketball, wrestling, baseball, lacrosse, outdoor track & field, tennis, golf) and 10 sports for women (volleyball, cross country, field hockey, soccer, basketball, lacrosse, outdoor track & field, softball, tennis, and golf).

The NSIAC was formed when the "Little Six", as it was called, broke from the North Carolina Intercollegiate Athletic Conference in 1930.

A name change became necessary when the league accepted Newberry College as its first member from the state of South Carolina in 1961.

The league received its name from a contest in which Kurt Brenneman of Greensboro, North Carolina became the first to submit the SAC-8 moniker.

Dr. Fred Bentley, of Mars Hill College, was named league president for its inaugural year, by a vote of the member institutions.

[2] A more recent change to the conference membership was announced on April 5, 2019, when Limestone College, which had joined as a football-only member in 2017 and added field hockey to its SAC membership the next year, was announced as a new full member effective in 2020–21, the same time it became Limestone University.

The leagues agreed that the SAC would coordinate the field hockey championship, while CC would fill the same role for men's wrestling.

[7] The most recent change was officially announced on May 10, 2022, when the Division I Atlantic Sun Conference (then branded as the ASUN Conference) announced that Queens would leave the SAC to start a transition to D-I on July 1 as a new ASUN member.

Wingate replaced Newberry College as the final member for the birth of the all-sports SAC in 1989.