Big East Presidents to Meet Sunday at LinesMaker.com

Big East Presidents to Meet Sunday

HARTFORD, Conn. —The pres­i­dents of the Big East mem­ber schools will dis­cuss the future of the con­fer­ence at a meet­ing this week­end, UConn Pres­i­dent Susan Herbst said Wednesday.

Herbst, in an email to The Asso­ci­ated Press, said the meet­ing in Wash­ing­ton on Sun­day is a con­fi­den­tial gath­er­ing for con­fer­ence pres­i­dents only and will not involve other uni­ver­sity officials.

“We have to talk about the future and how to go for­ward as a strong Big East,” she wrote.

Last week, the Big East pres­i­dents and ath­letic direc­tors met at a hastily called meet­ing in New York City strate­gies for restock­ing the league after Syra­cuse and Pitts­burgh had they are leav­ing for the Atlantic Coast Conference.

After that meet­ing, Com­mis­sioner John Mar­i­natto said the schools had com­mit­ted to going for­ward as a group and recruit­ing new mem­bers. Navy and Air Force are the Big East’s top tar­gets for expansion.

But mul­ti­ple offi­cials at Con­necti­cut said the school did not agree to stay in the Big East Con­fer­ence, and ear­lier this week Gov. Dan­nel P. Mal­loy con­firmed that UConn has expressed inter­est in join­ing the ACC if it expands fur­ther from 14 to 16 teams.

Herbst on Wednes­day assured mem­bers of the school’s board of trustees that UConn is still work­ing with the Big East, and urged them to “ignore the gos­sip on the national scene.”

“Big East pres­i­dents have been engaged in fre­quent com­mu­ni­ca­tion by phone or in per­son,” she said. “We’re com­mit­ted together to make the Big East work, to make it stronger in spite of the announce­ment that Syra­cuse and Pitts­burgh will leave to go to the ACC.”

Mal­loy said this week that he did not expect the issue of con­fer­ence realign­ment to be resolved quickly, and said he sus­pected fur­ther expan­sion of the ACC might hinge on whether Notre Dame was inter­ested in join­ing that conference.

Herbst reit­er­ated to the board of trustees that she will do what is in the best inter­ests of the school, and its stu­dent ath­letes and “to ensure the suc­cess­ful long term future of the ath­letic pro­gram and to pur­sue the wishes of this board and our community.”

“We’ll play some­where, and we’ll be very open and trans­par­ent about our needs and our pri­or­i­ties as this moves for­ward,” she said.

Asso­ci­ated Press writer Stephanie Reitz in Storrs and Col­lege Foot­ball Writer Ralph Russo in New York con­tributed to this report

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