The Atlantic 10 Conference has made bold moves over the years to secure its standing as one of the premier athletic conferences in college basketball. They recently made a move that no other conference was considering. They added new Division I Bellarmine University as the conference’s 16th full time member, beginning with the upcoming 2022-2023 school year. 

The addition of Bellarmine helps the A10 expand into the south and enter the State of Kentucky and the Louisville media market. 

The conference has several icon arenas in Rose Hill Gym at Fordham and Tom Gola Arena at La Salle. Now they will be adding another.

Bellarmine plays its home games at historic Freedom Hall in Louisville, which is one of the more iconic college basketball arenas in the country. It is the former home of the Louisville Cardinals.

FROM WIKIPEDIA COMMONS

Bellarmine’s athletic teams are known as the Knights. The university competes at the NCAA Division I level as members of the ASUN Conference for most sports.^[60]

Bellarmine sponsors five sports that are not sponsored by the ASUN, one of which will become an ASUN sport in July 2021. The men’s lacrosse team, the only NCAA Division I lacrosse team in Kentucky, is a member of the Southern Conference (SoCon) through the 2021 season, after which it will join the ASUN’s relaunched men’s lacrosse league.^[61] Bellarmine added men’s wrestling to its SoCon membership when it joined the ASUN.^[62] Men’s and women’s swimming and diving joined the Coastal Collegiate Sports Association upon the Knights’ arrival in the ASUN. The women’s field hockey team was independent for its first Division I season in 2020–21,^[60] and will become a single-sport member of the Mid-American Conference in July 2021.^[63]

In 2011 the Knights won the NCAA Men’s Division II Basketball Championship.^[8] In 2015, the Bellarmine University Dance Team won their first national title at the 2015 NDA collegiate championship. In 2019, the team won their second national title at the 2019 NDA collegiate championship.^[64][65] In 2012 Bellarmine announced the start of its swimming program. The university’s newest sport is wrestling, added for the 2016–17 school year; Bellarmine effectively absorbed the wrestling program of St. Catharine College, an NAIA member that closed at the end of the 2015–16 school year.^[66] This returned NCAA wrestling to the state of Kentucky for the first time since the University of Kentucky dropped the sport in 1982. Bellarmine wrestling will continue to compete in the SoCon after most other sports move to the ASUN.