The 12 institutions that announced the formation of a new athletics conference have officially filed with the NCAA Division II to start competing.

The Mountain East Conference's formal application, along with all 12 school presidents' signatures, was delivered on Friday to the NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis.

Locally, the conference would include West Liberty University and Wheeling Jesuit University.

The presidents of both those schools along with 10 others signed a formal application.

Since August, members of the newly formed Mountain East Conference have been waiting, waiting to get the green light from the NCAA.

And now that all the paperwork is filed, they are just months away.

"We feel that we have a very strong application and look forward to the NCAA committee considering that application in February," said Mountain East Conference Commissioner Reid Amos.

Schools throughout the conference know their work isn't done, like officials at Wheeling Jesuit University.

"We have a lot of work that needs to continue to be done and just the excitement of having a conference that all member institutions are similar in their thought process excites us," said Danny Sancomb, director of athletics at Wheeling Jesuit University.

On Monday night, Amos explained what would happen if the NCAA approves the new conference.

"They would either choose to make us a provisional NCAA Division 2 Conference or choose not to," said Amos. "If they would they provide provisional status additionally, other steps, the hope is that we would become an active conference Aug. 1, 2013."

Member schools are just waiting to hear "yes."

"We think we have a group of institutions that are very similar in their involvement with athletics and with academics and we want to align ourselves in a conference that is similar to who we are," said Sancomb.


In the unlikely event that the conference is not approved for competition, Amos says the schools could chose to compete as a group of independents.