The Summit League was founded in 1982 as the Association of Mid-Continent Universities (AMCU or AMCU-8) with eight members. The only one of these schools that is still a member is Western Illinois. In 1989, the AMCU changed its name to the Mid-Continent Conference, or MCC (those initials, however, were also being used by the Midwestern Collegiate Conference, now the Horizon League).
The Mid-Continent saw many changes in the first part of the 1990s, with the biggest coming in 1992 and 1994. In 1992, the conference added women's sports after it absorbed the North Star Conference, a league that only sponsored women's sports. Then in 1994, six schools (including three charter members) left for the Midwestern Collegiate Conference. They were replaced by six other schools, five of them coming from the collapsed East Coast Conference. None of the schools that joined in 1994 are now in the league.
Since the 1994 changes, the conference has had anywhere from 8 to 10 members. It changed its name to The Summit League in 2007.
Members
The Summit League now has nine full members. The most recent change in membership took place in 2023, when the conference's last remaining charter member, Western Illinois University, left for the Ohio Valley Conference. Another recent change took place in 2021, when the University of St. Thomas, located in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area, joined the conference to start an unprecedented move from NCAA Division III directly to Division I.
↑The university changed its athletic identity from UMKC Kangaroos to Kansas City Roos in 2019. The university name has not changed, and the school still markets itself as UMKC outside of sports.[1]
The Summit League has seven "associate" members—schools that play in a few sports, usually but not always one. Three of these schools play three sports in the conference, and three more house one sport in the conference. (Note that the NCAA counts men's and women's teams in the same sport as playing two different sports, and also considers swimming and diving to be a single sport.)
Western Illinois left the Summit League in 2023, but kept its men's soccer team in that conference for the fall 2023 season. That team will join the rest of the university's sports in the Ohio Valley Conference in 2024.