Kennesaw State has accepted an invitation to join the Big South Conference, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. The Owls are joining as a football-only associate member for the 2015 season, the first year they will play the sport.
Kennesaw State will remain in the Atlantic Sun, which doesn’t offer football, for other sports.
A news conference has been scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday at Fifth Third Bank Stadium.
The university’s financing plan for football was approved by the Board of Regents in February. Brian Bohannon, formerly an assistant at Georgia Tech, was hired as coach in March.
The last hurdle for the university was finding a conference.
Athletic director Vaughn Williams has said that the Owls would be open to joining a conference as a football-only member so that he could preserve the ties that Kennesaw State had with the Atlantic Sun.
Williams declined to comment. A call to Big South commissioner Kyle B. Kallander wasn’t returned.
The Big South is composed of six teams in football, with its members in South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. The conference is adding Monmouth (N.J.), which is joining as a football-only associate member in 2014.
However, the conference hasn’t been immune from the carousel that has affected most. It lost Stony Brook after the 2012 football season to the Colonial Athletic Association and will lose Virginia Military Institute to the Southern Conference after the 2013-14 athletic season.
The addition of Kennesaw State will give the conference seven football teams in 2015, if membership holds.
Kennesaw joined the Atlantic Sun in the 2005-06 athletic year. The Owls had previously been members of the Peach Belt Conference (1994-2005) in Division II, where they won five national championships in various sports. They were NAIA members (1985-94) before that.
The Southern Conference or Big South were thought to be potential homes for Kennesaw State because of the two conferences’ geographic footprints. The Southern Conference lost Georgia Southern to the Sun Belt in March, but added Mercer in May to keep a presence in Georgia.
Kennesaw State will be an interesting fit in the Big South,whose headquarters are in Charlotte, N.C. The school’s resident enrollment of 24,600 is almost twice as big as the conference’s next largest school, Liberty (12,600).
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