Southern Athletic Association
| Southern Athletic Association (SAA) |
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| Established | Chartered: 2011 Began play: 2012 |
| Association | NCAA |
| Division | Division III |
| Members | 12 |
| Sports fielded | 21 (men's: 10; women's: 11) |
| Headquarters | Atlanta, Georgia |
| Commissioner | Jay Gardiner |
| Website | www |
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The Southern Athletic Association (SAA) is a college athletic conference in NCAA Division III that began play in the 2012–13 school year. It was formed in 2011 by seven members of the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference and independent Berry College.
Two schools, the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL), announced their intention to become affiliate members of the conference for football, effective in 2015. Both are members of the University Athletic Association (UAA), which at the time had a football scheduling alliance with the North Coast Athletic Conference (NCAC). However, after the 2012 season, the NCAC adopted a full round-robin football schedule, making it impossible for that conference to fill in all of its non-conference dates with the four UAA members that sponsor the sport.
Over the summer of 2015, Chicago and WUSTL announced that they would leave the SAA after two seasons of competition in order to join more geographically-convenient conferences. WUSTL will maintain its football affiliation with the UAA for the 2017 season before joining the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin in 2018 as a football-only member. For nearly a year, Chicago did not announce a future league affiliation, but it announced in May 2016 that it would become a football-only member of the Midwest Conference in 2017.
On November 18, 2015, Trinity University (Texas) and Austin College announced they would affiliate with the SAA for football, renewing a relationship that was lost when the SAA split from the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference. As a result, the SCAC will no longer offer football as a sport from 2017.
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