Back in August, St. Joseph’s College of Standish – one of the Maine Athletic Conference’s most successful members – announced that it would be leaving the MAC after the 2001-2002 school year to become an NCAA Division III independent institution.

On Friday, the MAC announced a major expansion and welcomed another St. Joseph’s College – the Fighting Saints of Rutland, Vt. – as a member of that new-look league.

The newly formed nine-team league, the Sunrise Athletic Conference, will include six current MAC institutions and three schools from the Mayflower Conference.

The new additions: Fisher College of Boston, Lyndon State College of Lyndonville, Vt., and St. Joseph’s of Rutland, Vt.

The MAC teams that will play their games in the Sunrise Athletic Conference are Husson College of Bangor, Thomas College of Waterville, and the University of Maine campuses in Fort Kent, Machias, Farmington, and Presque Isle.

The announcement was made jointly by Royal Goheen, the commissioner of the MAC, and Skip Pound, who serves as director of athletics at Lyndon State and as the president of the Mayflower Conference.

UM-Fort Kent athletic director Jim Graffam said he’s excited about what the Sunrise Athletic Conference will do for his institution.

“It will give us more home games, the competition is going to be very good, and from a budgetary point of view, I think it’s going to cost us less to do this,” Graffam said.

Graffam and his men’s basketball coach, Derek Johnson, pointed out that after playing its first home games on Nov. 16-17, the Bengals don’t return to Fort Kent for a game until Jan. 12.

“I’ve got people who stop me on the road and say, ‘Hey, we saw you in November. When are we gonna see you again?'” Johnson said.

Graffam said the Bengals have always had trouble getting people to travel to the northern tip of the state for games, as this year’s schedule illustrates: Of 28 games, only eight will be played in Fort Kent.

The new schedule will call for home-and-home dates for basketball, which guarantees the Bengals eight home league contests. With some non-league matchups thrown in, Graffam thinks a schedule with 50 percent home games is possible.

“This would be the first time in probably 20 years at Fort Kent that we’ll have the chance to play half of our games at home.”

But that doesn’t mean the new additions won’t create some interesting travel for the Bengals.

“Going to Vermont isn’t exactly a piece of cake for us,” Johnson said. “It’s an 11-hour trip. But that will add a bit of spice to it. And if we go through Canada, we can make it in seven hours.”

The new conference will be affiliated with the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and will sponsor 10 sports: five for women and five for men.

Fall sports are men’s and women’s soccer, men’s golf, men’s and women’s cross country, and women’s volleyball.

Winter sports will be men’s and women’s basketball, and spring offerings are baseball and softball.

The soccer schedules will include one game against each league school, while basketball teams will play each league opponent twice a year. Conference tournaments in every sport except golf and cross country will be conducted in a final-four format.

While field hockey – a current MAC offering – will not be a SAC sport, Graffam doesn’t think schools will eliminate it. His school doesn’t play field hockey, but he does have a similar situation.

“We have Alpine skiing, but that doesn’t help anyone out [in terms of finding other sports that the league could add],” Graffam said.

The process that culminated in the formation of the Sunrise Conference began two years ago, and presidents of the institutions gave their final approval during the week of Dec. 5, a release from the Maine Athletic Conference said.

Meetings were held at the University of Southern Maine’s campus in Gorham on Friday.

Key officials in the new league include Nancy Hensel, who is the president of UMPI and who will chair the President’s Council; Goheen, the former athletic director at UMPI who will serve as the acting commissioner; and Rene Cloukey, the sports director at WAGM in Presque Isle, who will serve as the acting sports information director.