The addition of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College to the ACC in the last two years shook things up for all sports in the conference.

But the changing conference landscape could have arguably impacted volleyball the most, as the ACC Volleyball Committee decided in February to scrap its end-of-the-year conference tournament in favor of a regular season double round-robin.

The new setup has each ACC team competing against the other 11 conference teams twice a year, one at home and one away.

Rather than the traditional 16 conference matches, each team will now play a total of 22 conference contests.

“I think it’s a good change,” said Georgia Tech head coach Bond Shymansky. “Your right to go to the NCAA should be earned over three months, not over three days.”

Of course Shymansky, whose team finished the regular season with an ACC-best 16-0 record last year, would approve of scrapping the tournament. But finishing on top last year, he said, has nothing to do with his support of the change.

“I look at the top two, three or four teams who had a good season but faltered in the tournament,” Shymansky. “Right now those teams are being leapfrogged and punished, and I don’t think that’s a fair way for their season to end.”

The Terps are one of the teams doing the jumping. Last year, they relied on a conference tournament push to overcome the team’s 7-9 regular season in the ACC. But Terp head coach Janice Kruger thinks her team will still be successful.

“I think we’re capable of playing day in and day out at a high level,” Kruger said. “It puts more focus on every match, which is more like NCAA play anyway.”

The Terps are currently 6-0, but none of their victories have been over ranked opponents.

In the old system, high-ranked teams were hurting their chances of earning an NCAA Tournament berth by playing lower-seeded teams in the ACC Tournament. With those low-seeded games now out the window, the conference will likely send more teams to the NCAA Tournament.

“As our committee looked at it, typically we used to put four [teams] into the NCAAs, but the last couple years we were only getting two,” said Davis Whitfield, ACC assistant commissioner for championships. “We had to do something to maintain more slots in the NCAA tournament.”

That something – an overhaul of the system – had been on the minds of ACC Volleyball Committee members for several years, but never saw a formal proposal.

The committee, composed of Whitfield, several administrators and all 12 conference coaches, finally made that formal recommendation in February.

They then presented the idea to the Senior Women’s Administrators (SWA) in April, and finalized the change at May’s ACC spring meetings in Amelia Island, Fla.

“It was something all the coaches in the ACC were unanimous about,” Miami coach Nicole Welch said. “History has shown that other conferences set up that way have gotten more teams in the tournament, so it was something our conference wanted to explore.”

Many of the NCAA’s prominent volleyball conferences – the Big Ten, the Pac-10, the Big 12 – use the double round-robin format.

By moving in the same direction, perhaps the ACC can establish itself among the elite volleyball conferences in the country.

Contact reporter Jason Fraley at fraleydbk@gmail.com.