The 15-member Great Lakes Valley Conference has made its name throughout the last 31 years as a power in NCAA Division II basketball. In the last few years, however, the GLVC has seen success in many sports, and the league can now claim itself as one of the nation’s top in all NCAA Division II athletics.
The The formation of the GLVC can be traced as far back as 1972 when the athletic directors of three member schools - Kentucky Wesleyan, Bellarmine and Indiana State University at Evansville (now the University of Southern Indiana) - began preliminary discussions about forming a basketball conference. Four years later, the University of Indianapolis and Saint Joseph’s College expressed interest. On July 7, 1978, those schools - along with Ashland University - united to become the GLVC.
In 2009, Maryville University and the University of Illinois at Springfield became the newest members of the league. The schools are two of 13 institutions that have joined the league since its formation. Those members include: Lewis University (1980), Indiana-Purdue at Fort Wayne (1984), Northern Kentucky University (1985), Kentucky State University (1989), Quincy University (1994), Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (1994), University of Wisconsin-Parkside (1994), University of Missouri-St. Louis (1995), Drury (2005), Missouri S&T (2005), Rockhurst (2005), Illinois-Springfield (2009) and Maryville (2009). Ashland and Kentucky State left the conference after the 1994 season, IPFW left the league following the 2000-01 academic year and SIU Edwardsville exited the league following the 2007-08 academic year.
The conference headquarters are located in downtown Indianapolis, one of the many Midwest major media markets in which the league maintains a presence. The GLVC has schools in Milwaukee/Northern Illinois (UW-Parkside), Chicago (Lewis), Indianapolis (Indianapolis), Cincinnati (Northern Kentucky), Louisville (Bellarmine), Evansville (Southern Indiana), Springfield, Mo. (Drury), Owensboro (Kentucky Wesleyan), Kansas City (Rockhurst) and St. Louis (Maryville, UM-St. Louis).
The conference sponsors 17 championships in baseball, basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, indoor and outdoor track and field, and tennis for men and basketball, cross country, softball, soccer, tennis, indoor and outdoor track and field, golf, and volleyball for women.
GLVC institutions have won 11 national championships in basketball. Kentucky Wesleyan leads all Division II institutions with eight men’s basketball titles, while Southern Indiana won the men’s crown in 1995. Northern Kentucky’s women won the school’s first-ever basketball national championship in 2000 and followed with a national title in 2008. In addition, SIU Edwardsville became the first GLVC school to win a national championship in softball in 2007.
In 2001, the league announced the creation of the GLVC Hall of Fame, with the first class being inducted in 2002. The GLVC annually presents the Richard F. Scharf Paragon Award to the top male and female student-athlete in the league, and the Bertram Award to a distinguished alum who both succeeded while a GLVC student-athlete and excelled in accomplishments after graduation.
The GLVC strives to adhere to the NCAA Division II Strategic Platform and has introduced several initiatives in recent years including the GLVC Sportsmanship Award which acknowledges the institution that exemplifies sportsmanship in the view of its peers.
The league continually maintains an effort to combine academic and athletic excellence and the hard work put forth by the student-athletes has been evident on the playing fields and in the classrooms.