It was a normal Tuesday morning on the campus of Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania on March 25. Students were in class, the sun was out, birds were chirping.
Then the school was hit by one of the most shocking announcements in the institution’s history. Two emails were released around 11:15 a.m. – the first to student-athletes and the second to other members of the University community – announcing that the school will transition from Division I to Division III athletics.
The emails were sent by Father Malachi Van Tassell, the president of the University. He informed SFU’s students, faculty and staff members that the Red Flash will compete for one more academic year as a member of the Division I Northeast Conference (2025-26) before transitioning into the Division III Presidents’ Athletic Conference (PAC) in 2026-27.
After the news was delivered, all SFU’s athletics teams held emergency meetings to try and collectively process the information that they had received.
Second-year Red Flash head softball coach Beth Krysiak said that the University’s coaches had no advance notice of the announcement.
“I was just as shocked as the rest of the community,” said Krysiak, who led the Red Flash softball team to an NEC title and an appearance in the NCAA Division I Regionals last spring. Her team is currently 6-0 in NEC action in 2025.
“This was not communicated to the coaches until 10 a.m. yesterday (Tuesday). We heard rumblings that this was a bigger meeting than usual, because typically Father Malachi doesn’t come to our meetings. But we did not know that this would happen.”
Krysiak believes that such an impactful announcement should have been handled differently.
“I wish that we had the opportunity to tell our student-athletes, as opposed to them getting an email three minutes before our meeting.”
The announcement came one week after the Red Flash men’s basketball team competed in the “First Four” round of the NCAA Tournament on March 18. The excitement and joy from that experience contrasted sharply with the somberness and disappointment that remains palpable across campus this week.
Thanks to the Division I opportunities that the institution has offered, Saint Francis’ student body has long been a diverse one. It has historically included students from all over the United States and the world, as well as students from the region who make a short commute to campus from their childhood homes each day.
With this move, the University will likely lose much of this diversity: a high number of its student-athletes are likely to transfer in order to continue to compete at the Division I level beyond next year, and the draw of competing at a DI school is now gone.
At a press conference during the afternoon of March 25, Fr. Malachi said that schools like Saint Francis can’t compete financially in the current Division I college sports landscape, one that includes the transfer portal, Name-Image-Likeness challenges and seemingly nonstop conference realignment.
The president said that the decision – which was made by the University’s Board of Trustees – is also an attempt to make the student-athlete experience more manageable, with less travel time and more time spent in the classroom.
