<p>A friend remarked to me that he hoped his D would go to College B rather than College A because College A had "division 1" sports.</p>
<p>Which got me wondering....</p>
<p>a) Is the division categorization college specific or sport specific? That is, could a college be division 1 in football and division 3 in baseball?</p>
<p>b) How is division-ness determined? Does a college choose to play within a specific division, or does some central organization assign divisions?</p>
<p>whoops, guess my attempt at doing an HTML accent mark didn’t work…</p>
<p>There are some schools that are D1 in a sport and D3 in other sports. Johns Hopkins has a D1 lacrosse team, for example, but is D3 in other sports. I think Colorado College has a D1 hockey team and Hartwick had a D1 soccer team. The NCAA recently took it to a vote and it is going to be allowed to continue that way for such schools.</p>
<p>However, there are not that many schools in that category. Also the D1,2,3 categories are really not absolute. You have some schools that are D3 in a sport but are at the top of the heap in D3 that are better than D1 schools in some sports. </p>
<p>There are official rules about the Divisions that I do not know, however, for most schools are in leagues through tradition and those leagues determine the division. If you change divisions, you have to change leagues. </p>
<p>The athletic schedules have always been incomprehensible to me. Schools are in leagues but they may still just play nearby schools based on tradition, competitiveness and convenience. </p>
<p>What is important about the divisions is that you cannot get an athletic scholarship as a D-3 athlete.</p>