Queens is now one year into the transition to Division I. Has it been a smooth move?

Daniel Lugo smiles as he sits in his office in Myers Park and tells a story he’s told so many people in the past year that he’s lost count:

The same week the school’s board of trustees unanimously voted to put in motion Queens’ transition to Division I athletics competition, he was at an uptown barbershop getting a haircut. “We’re having this great sports conversation, and ... my barber said, ‘Wow, you’re pretty knowledgeable about sports. What do you do?’” Lugo recalls. “I said, ‘Yeah, I work in higher ed. I’m the president over at Queens University of Charlotte.’ And he said, ‘Do you guys have sports?’”

His smile turns into a chuckle because this, in fact, speaks to why Queens announced almost exactly one year ago that it was planning to launch a four-year transition into the NCAA Division I ASUN collegiate athletic conference. Because not only does Queens have sports, but as leaders like to tout, it has more NCAA championships than any school in Charlotte.

The transition from Division II, in which it won all those titles, to Division I, in which it won’t have a shot at more for three years, started last July 1 — and Lugo asserts that, as changes go, the one at the small, private, nonprofit college he leads is going very well.

At the same time, it has been a change. A dramatic one. The most monumental since Queens went fully co-ed in 1987 after serving predominately as a women’s institution for decades.

And like most sweeping changes, this one hasn’t always gone down easily.

While many members of the Queens community have found it energizing and exciting, others would describe it using more measured adjectives. Many Royals say they felt a greater sense of pride this past school year by virtue of getting an instant promotion to Division I-athlete status; but some still question the decision, and in extreme cases, students wound up leaving because of the change.

“The very reality of everything,” says Queens’ associate athletic director Jeff Dugdale, “is that — whether we went to Division III or Division I — that a group of people, this would not have been what they bargained for. Because they came for something different.”

“It’s not all roses,” adds Dugdale, who also leads the school’s flagship teams, men’s and women’s swimming, which at Division II won a combined 14 NCAA championships.

“But it’s not all thorns either.”

‘Let’s go ahead and make this move’

To call sports a big deal at Queens is like saying Charlotte is home to a few bankers.

At every opportunity, someone at some level of upper leadership will point out that they spent the last five years of their time in Division II in the top 10 in the final standings for the Learfield Directors’ Cup — which ranks universities’ athletics programs in each division based on conference standings over a wide swath of sports teams — and the last two in the top five. Queens has achieved this, administrators are also quick to point out, despite being by far the smallest school in the rankings.

Or they’ll note its 25 national championships in Division II, including seven in a row each for men’s and women’s swimming.

Yet none of those accomplishments seemed to be doing much through the years to increase Queens’ total enrollment (1,873 including undergraduate and graduate students for fall 2022, down from 2,063 for fall 2021) or to boost its national, regional, or even local visibility. Hence the decision to begin, in June 2021, the Division I feasibility study that officially got the ball rolling on all of this.

It wound up happening more quickly than expected.

By February 2022, Queens’ board of trustees approved the next step — the Division I exploratory plan. At that point, some on campus figured any move was maybe two or three years down the road. Three months later, the school announced the July 1 jump.

Queens athletic director Cherie Swarthout explains that part of what increased the administration’s urgency was the ratification in January 2022 of a new NCAA constitution. That constitution came with the creation of a transformation committee that potentially would changing the requirements for Division I membership, among other considerations.

“So we decided, ‘You know what? The only thing that we can control is what we know right now, so let’s go ahead and make this move,’” Swarthout says.

The decision came so last-minute that Queens’ two dozen athletics teams already had full Division II schedules for the 2022-23 school year that went from being considered finalized to being blown up. Each team’s schedule was rebuilt in short order to constitute a full slate of ASUN matchups. The school also had to beef up its creative services team and resources so it could produce ESPN+ broadcasts of soccer, volleyball and field hockey games in the fall.

Ultimately, Swarthout says, everyone hit their marks and that the launch of the transition to Division I was a success everyone at Queens should be proud of.

So, then, what was there to complain about?

‘I think that was a little bit tough’

If you talk to enough current and former Queens students and staff members, several key concerns emerge.

One is pretty straightforward, relatively minor, and only temporary: Part of the cost of jumping up to Division I — in addition to the financial costs, which include a reclassification application fee in the neighborhood of $1.7 million — is forfeiting the opportunity to compete in NCAA championships during the four-year transition period.

That spelled, for example, the end of the swimming teams’ run of consecutive NCAA titles this past semester.

“That was, I think, a little bit hard on us,” says Danielle Melilli, a senior on the women’s team who in 2022 also was an NCAA Division II champion in four individual events. “Because these past seven years, that was a huge goal for a lot of swimmers.”

Another was the fear, whether real or imagined, that stepping up to Division I would mean trading dominance in swimming and diving and a proud tradition of success in sports like men’s basketball, and track and field for ... maybe not mediocrity, but perhaps more challenges than in the past.

There have indeed been several instances of Royals teams posting markedly worse overall records this season than last.

For example, the men’s basketball team — which finished the 2021-22 season with a dominating 30-4 overall record and as champion of their former Division II conference, the South Atlantic — was 18-15 this past season; Royals women’s tennis went 5-18 in its first season as a D-I squad after posting a 16-2 Division II record last year; and the men’s tennis team was 5-17 a year removed from a 15-5 campaign.

However, slides aren’t atypical for schools making such leaps. And, like with waiting out the NCAA postseason ban, it could turn out to be just a short-term concern. The athletic department is playing a longer game, one that it figures it can break open thanks to recruiting efforts newly geared toward attracting Division I-level talent.

Meanwhile, there are other bigger, broader concerns that are more existential.

One of those has to do with the perception that what Queens is doing flies in the face of what attracted many to the school in the first place.

“Queens, I feel, when I entered, it’s a small school,” says Milan Tomin, who last year earned his master’s degree from Queens following four years of undergraduate studies as an international student from Serbia. “They advertise it as small school, small classes, you know everyone.”

The move, he says, “will maybe bring some more competition for athletes. Maybe more funds from NCAA. ... But at the same time, I mean, I like Queens the way it was when it was D-II — small. If I really wanted to go to D-I, I would just choose a different school.”

Then there’s this: Is Queens putting too much focus on athletics?

‘If they’re not an athlete, it’s really strange’

At Queens, there’s a sense that student-athletes have an outsized presence on campus.

A number of current and former students and staff members interviewed for this story stated, without prompting, that more than 50% of the student body plays a sport at Queens — despite the fact that the university says the figure was actually 28.5% as of last fall. Some of those interviewed also pointed out that students who don’t play a sport are considered such oddities that there’s a term for them: NARP, short for Non-Athletic Regular Person.

“People at Queens ... if they’re not an athlete, it’s really strange,” says Sam McInnes, a graduate student who captains the women’s triathlon team. “When you first meet someone, you’re like, ‘What team are you on?’ Because they’re always gonna be on a team.”

This has been a perception for years at the school. And, as at any school with a reputation as an athletic powerhouse, there’s long been concern about student-athletes’ ability to juggle team commitments and academic obligations.

That concern was renewed, in the eyes of some, when the Royals jumped to Division I.

According to an NCAA fact sheet regarding time management for its student-athletes, Division II athletes can expect to spend 37 hours a week on academics and 31 hours a week on athletics, while Division I athletes average 35.5 hours doing schoolwork and 33 with their sport.

Marco Scipioni, who spent 6-1/2 years as an associate professor at Queens before taking another teaching job in January, says he and many of his then-colleagues were at first disappointed by the move when it was announced last year.

“In principle,” he says, “I think higher ed and collegiate sports go together. Because sports have a very positive component, which is teaching kids to work in teams, discipline, et cetera. We’re not just classrooms and books. It gives them this other dimension.”

But Queens’ move “seems to put sports before academics, right?” says Sciponi, now an associate professor at UNC Charlotte (which is also a Division I school, but where only about 2% of the student body plays an NCAA sport). “Here we are celebrating the sport culture. How about celebrating more the academic culture — giving more support to the academic piece?”

Up till last year, in Division II, athletes could get to pretty much all of their regular-season games and conference tournaments by bus. Now, most of their travel requires time spent sitting in airports and on planes, since the Division I ASUN includes members schools in Arkansas and Florida that are more than 700 miles away.

But sending athletes in Royals gear to farther-flung parts of the country was, administrators are quick to remind, part of the point.

‘This is a long-term play’

Along with his barbershop story, there’s another refrain that Lugo, Queens’ president, has told people over and over during the first year of the Division I transition.

“No one wants to be a ‘best-kept secret,’” he says. “There’s zero future in being a best-kept secret, and in many ways, our athletic department was a best-kept secret. Not anymore. ... There’s much more interest in what is happening at Queens.”

New student enrollment, Queens says, is up 30% for the fall 2023 semester, and Lugo says applications from men specifically have risen by more than 40% (notable because of the fact that, in recent years, enrollment has hovered around a 2-to-1 female-to-male ratio). He also notes that applications from major cities near ASUN schools — Atlanta; Jacksonville, Florida; Nashville — have increased by more than 40%.

Lugo says that’s a result, direct or indirect, of things like the men’s rugby team rolling to a 10-3 record that included a September win over then-No. 10-ranked Penn State. Or, like a group of guys who were recruited to play Division II basketball shocking Marshall University last November in their Division I debut. Or Dugdale’s men’s swimming team rolling to an ASUN Conference championship in March.

The administration at Queens is squishy on setting a goal for enrollment growth, just that “we would be a better partner to the city of Charlotte by growing,” Lugo adds. “There’s a need for more of our graduates in the Charlotte marketplace.”

He’s much more clear, however, on the answers to two common questions.

One, he insists, they’re not doing this for the money. “It’s costing us money. ... Start-up costs that we’re not gonna retrieve.” A group of school trustees and their families donated a combined $2 million to launch fundraising efforts to help pay for transition-related costs (which include added staff, new equipment, minor updates to facilities, and a travel budget that Queens says has increased by about 400%), “but short term, it’s a revenue-loser for us.”

“This is a long-term play,” Lugo says. “It is about building an institution that’s worthy of more attention. It’s about building an institution that wants to have a much more diverse reach of students that we can enroll and recruit. ... One day we’d love it if it broke even.”

Two, Lugo asserts, academics remains the priority. As a result of its transition to D-I, the university says, three academic support staffers were added to aid teams. And while Lugo says he understands professors’ concerns, the fourth-year president offers that their overall GPA rose to “the highest it’s been since I’ve been around” — more than 100 student-athletes earned a 4.0 last fall, Queens says.

Asked what grade he’d give the university a year into the transition, Lugo ponders for just a few seconds before declaring it to be an A-minus.

But, perhaps more importantly, how do students feel at this point?

‘Everyone is just very locked in’

There is one thing pretty much every Queens student-athlete seems to agree on: Division I is no joke.

“It’s a different vibe when you go to the D-I events,” says Ollie Smith, a senior on the men’s golf team. “When I played D-II, I would have quite a few friends and similar people you play with, and it seems very chill and relaxed. But you go to these D-I events, and everyone’s just a lot more serious. The vibe is a lot more focused. Everyone is just very locked in.”

Grace Guglielmo, a graduate student who finished up her career on the women’s lacrosse and women’s soccer teams this past year, says, “Every game is a battle. If you don’t show up — and if you don’t put your best foot forward ... you will lose.”

There is a certain amount of pride among some student-athletes who have fully embraced the change.

“When you look back as a proud Queens alumni in five, 10, 20 years, you’ll say, ‘Hey, I was part of the first generation leading the transition into Division I, starting the success story, transitioning the success story from Division II to the Division I level, and that’s very, very special,’” says Jan Delkeskamp, who is captain of the men’s swimming team.

“I still get goosebumps when I talk about (being at) the first inaugural men’s basketball game, and you have this entire Levine Center packed, the crowd cheering. You’re like, Wow, what a memorable experience.”

But at the other end of the spectrum, there’s something more like heartbreak.

Particularly trying times, for some

This much is undisputed: Per NCAA rules, if you play at a D-I school, you have five calendar years in which to play four seasons. That clock starts ticking when the student enrolls in college full-time. In D-II, student-athletes have 10 semesters or 15 quarters to complete four seasons of competition while enrolled full-time, but the key difference is that the clock effectively stops if you only attend part-time and aren’t competing, or are not enrolled.

In other words, D-II athletes can technically spread four years of eligibility over a long period — a decade, for instance, if they desire.

It’s also a fact that when Queens committed to the transition, there were students who lost their athletic eligibility due to the difference in the clock rules between D-II and D-I.

Beyond that, how things played out is debatable, at least one former student says.

Queens says that just 10 out of 430 Royals athletes were affected by the rule change; that affected athletes lost scholarships due to the change; and that athletes were allowed to appeal. In all 10 cases, according to university officials, it offered “to replace their athletic scholarship with institutional scholarships in the appeals decision.”

But one of those affected athletes — Jan Lukas Becker, a track and cross-country athlete for Queen who took a few years off from school in his early 20s — says it wasn’t nearly so simple as that.

Becker says he and other students rendered ineligible to play for Queens due to the rule change were initially given no indication that their scholarships were up in the air; but that in late June, less than 2-1/2 months before the start of the fall semester, he was blindsided by an email stating his scholarship wasn’t being renewed after all. Although he did win his appeal, he says he asked Queens multiple times whether it would fund his scholarship for the full two years of eligibility he had remaining in D-II and never got a straight answer.

To put it plainly, he says, “it was terrible communication from everyone involved.”

Ultimately, because he was worried about being able to afford to finish out at Queens if he didn’t get the full two years, he transferred to Mississippi College.

“From a standpoint that the university wants to go D-I, I get that,” says Becker, who at the Division II school in Flint, Mississippi is continuing to run competitively while working toward his graduate degree. “I get that they have to cut me because I don’t have D-I eligibility. I would accept that. But the way it was handled ... could have been better.”

If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is

The more you talk to members of the Queens community, and the more you listen to the perspectives and opinions of the various stakeholders, the more you realize how layered and complex this whole situation is.

On one hand, the Royals administration is more excited about the move than ever, and have plenty of positive stories to tell.

“As successful as we were in Division II,” says Swarthout, the athletic director, “here’s a perfect example: You and I have never had a conversation. The interviews that you’ve seen or heard with me, or with anyone on my staff, did not happen when we were at Division II. We weren’t on a ticker.” In the past year? “We beat Fairleigh Dickinson. We beat Marshall. (Both in men’s basketball.) Those things have been huge. We’ve had a lot of other successes, too, along the way.

“So, it is amplifying our brand. It’s accomplishing what we set out for it to do. There’s much more interest in what is happening at Queens.”

But on the other hand, there are clearly some tough issues they’ll continue to wrestle with as the transition continues into Year Two.

To put it another way: It’s not all thorns. But not all roses, either.