Summit League

The Summit League, or The Summit, is an NCAA Division I intercollegiate athletic conference with its membership mostly located in the Midwestern United States, from Minnesota in the east, to the Dakotas, Nebraska and Colorado to the West, and Missouri and Oklahoma to the South. Founded as the Association of Mid-Continent Universities in 1982, it rebranded as the Mid-Continent Conference in 1989, then again as the Summit League on June 1, 2007. The league headquarters are in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The membership currently consists of nine full members plus five associate members. The most recent change in the core conference membership is the departure of two longtime members, Western Illinois University and the University of Denver. Western Illinois was the last remaining charter member of the original conference membership, and they left the conference completely by 2023 and Denver left in 2026. WIU left for the Ohio Valley Conference and Denver left for the West Coast Conference. Other recent core changes include the 2021 arrival of the University of St. Thomas, which began an unprecedented transition from NCAA Division III to Division I. A year earlier, the University of Missouri–Kansas City returned as a full member after a seven-year absence with the new athletic identity of the Kansas City Roos, while Purdue University Fort Wayne left for the Horizon League. A total of 32 schools have been full members in the league's history.

The Summit does not sponsor football, but five of its members play the sport in the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), and since 2025 the Summit has had a formal relationship with the single-sport Missouri Valley Football Conference, the football home of four of those five schools at the time.