‘The future is bright’: Queens University of Charlotte stepping up to Division I
After three years in a bit of a holding pattern, Queens University of Charlotte’s athletic teams will be able to get back to vying for national championships this fall.
And the Royals can now do so, officially, at the Division I level.
On Monday, Queens was notified by the NCAA Division I Board of Directors that it has been elected to active Division I status effective next Tuesday — July 1 — having successfully completed all reclassification requirements on a recently accelerated timeline. The school announced the news Tuesday afternoon.
“This is just huge for us as an institution, for us as a department, for our student athletes, our coaches, who have been so resilient through all of it,” Queens director of athletics Cherie Swarthout told The Charlotte Observer on Tuesday, “because it was not flipping a switch and expecting ... ‘OK, we’re D-I now!’ It has been work, grind, decision-making, perseverance, resiliency. ...
“This has not been easy for for anyone, student, athletes, staff, et cetera.”
The school’s reclassification to Division I was announced on May 10, 2022, following a unanimous vote by Queens’ Board of Trustees to accept an invitation to join the Atlantic Sun Conference. The process officially began on July 1, 2022, and was originally supposed to take four years.
But this past January, the NCAA adopted a change reducing the time frame for the transition for Division II schools to three years.
In short, that meant Queens had to complete the parts of the process that originally would have been done in the fourth year instead in a matter of months. Fortunately, Swarthout said, it had already been working ahead.
The promotion to Division I represents the most monumental change for Queens since the Charlotte university went fully co-ed in 1987 after serving predominately as a women’s institution for decades. It will become the third Division I school in the Charlotte area, joining the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Davidson College; Queens offers more sports — and owns more national championship — than either of those schools.
Since the athletic program was established 35 years ago, the Royals have captured 28 team national championships and 144 individual national titles, all at the Division II level.
During the reclassification period, the Royals have been eligible to compete for Atlantic Sun championships but not national titles, per NCAA rules. So, for instance, the men’s swimming and diving team captured the department’s first championship in the conference this past February, but couldn’t advance beyond that.
Said Swarthout: “When you’ve got some teams that are performing at a really high level that could (realistically win national titles) ... it’s multifaceted. It’s retention, it’s recruitment, it’s all the pieces that build up a thriving athletic department.
“And I’m not just talking about student-athletes. I’m talking about coaches too — because coaches want to win, they want to be competitive, they want to have opportunity.”
“You want to be able to position your programs,” Swarthout continued. “And, of course, college athletics is an ever-changing landscape ... every day. Opt in, opt out, House settlement, you know, ‘Are student-athletes employees?,’ et cetera. There’s just a lot of pieces of the puzzle that are pretty fluid, for lack of a better word. And so we’re managing all of those pieces, also keeping the priorities of our department and our institution at the highest level, which is to be able to provide a great student-athlete experience, a great academic experience. ...
“We’re already a thriving institution, we’re just on a different platform, doing it a little bit differently now.”
This story was originally published June 24, 2025 at 1:41 PM.
