The 5 longest active regular season conference title streaks in D3 women's basketball
It's tough to win a conference regular season title once. Doing it in back-to-back years is impressive, and three years is exceptional. But these five programs have well surpassed even that mark.
While working on my book on D3 basketball the other day, I began thinking about year-to-year streaks that we tend to pick up on as programs surge into the national conversation. Streaks of consecutive seasons above .500, number of NCAA Tournament appearances in a row, or back-to-back years of 20 wins or more. In many ways, it’s these trends that shape an outsider’s overall perspective of a program, as compared to the perspective on a single team. It isn’t terribly hard to find programs that develop an exceptionally talented recruiting class for four years, leading to a 20+ win campaign in that final year with a roster stacked with seniors, before regressing again. But it’s rare to find programs that are capable of maintaining that standard of success over several recruiting classes, even as the natural ebbs and flows of an often-changing conference unfold around them. So many factors contribute to performance, especially within conference play where there’s such strong familiarity amongst opponents from year to year. To navigate through that and remain at the top of the league for a stretch of time is far easier said than done, and really an indication of the quality of leadership and culture of the program, rather than just the skill of a single group of players.
So it got me thinking, what are the longest active streaks of conference champions? I opted to examine regular season champions, rather than tournament champions, because I tend to think the regular season is a better indicator of a team’s consistency. After all, winning a regular season title in conference play requires sustained success for at least 7 or 8 weeks, while tournaments are usually played over just 3 or 4 days.
There’s a few things to remember as you look at this list. First, these are active streaks, so there are several cases here where longtime powerhouses did not win their league last season, and therefore, didn’t make the list. Second, I counted winning a share of the conference’s regular season title within this research, because while I know there are tiebreakers involved in most leagues, finishing in a tie atop the league standings still counts as a co-championship in my book. Third, I only counted the 2020-21 season in cases where conference standings were actually kept.
Hope you enjoy this read, and I plan to continue posting on Fridays for the next several weeks before getting into more coverage once we get closer to tip-off. Right now, we’re at 91 days until the first games tip-off on Nov. 7! It’ll be here before we know it.
Messiah | MAC Commonwealth | Streak: 8 seasons

Messiah is one of the traditional powers of D3 women’s hoops, with an incredible .752 win percentage (784-258) in 39 seasons under Mike Miller’s direction, including 13 seasons of at least 25 wins. The standard is high for a program with 23 NCAA Tournament appearances and 16 conference tournament championships to its name, so finding Messiah atop this list isn’t a major surprise. They’ve controlled the MAC Commonwealth for quite some time now, with their current streak of regular season titles going back to a 15-1 season (27-3 overall) in 2017-18. That longevity is pretty impressive, and the Falcons have been in good form the last two years, with a 27-1 record against MAC Commonwealth opponents in that span. And here’s one more thing that really stands out compared to the rest: all eight of those regular season titles have been won outright, something that no other program on this list has accomplished.
Ripon | Midwest | Streak: 7 seasons
Last season, Ripon made history. The Redhawks became the first program in the history of the Midwest Conference to win seventh consecutive regular season titles, surpassing St. Norbert’s run of six in a row in the mid-1980s. Ripon’s excellence is sometimes overlooked because, 1) it’s almost a given that they’ll be right at the top of this league every year, and 2) they’re right in the backyard of one of D3’s “power conferences”, the WIAC, which tends to dominate the Midwest headlines. But when you look at the numbers, Ripon’s consistency is very impressive, adding to the state of Wisconsin’s immense contributions to D3 women’s hoops. The Redhawks shared the MWC title in 2017-18 and 2022-23, but have won the regular season crown outright every other full season from 2018-2025 (Ripon went 3-0 in the 2020-21 season, but no official conference games were played due to Covid). And within that span, they’ve represented the MWC in the NCAA Tournament four times, three of those coming in the last four years. Head coach Lauren Busalacchi has led the Redhawks through this entire stretch, taking them from a program that struggled to break .500 for several years to a preseason conference favorite on an annual basis. Since 2021, Ripon has finished MWC play with a win percentage above .930 three times, marking one of the most successful runs in MWC history.
Transylvania | Heartland Collegiate | Streak: 7 seasons
If you were given a single guess to pick a team on this list, I’d have to think Transylvania would’ve been a popular pick. The Pioneers’ dominance in the HCAC under Juli Fulks was well documented, particularly as Transy went 33-0 in 2022-23, winning the first national championship in program history. At the time of that title-clinching win over Christopher Newport in Dallas, they had claimed 32 consecutive HCAC wins, a streak that would reach 53 before being snapped by Manchester this past winter. But the league’s strength rose in recent years, potentially in part due to seeing what Transy had accomplished on a national stage, making winning the HCAC a tougher test. Hanover and Mount St. Joseph were both tough challengers the last two years, and Berea, the 2024 CCS champ, moved into the league ahead of the 2024-25 campaign. On top of that, unlike Ripon and Messiah, Transy also had a coaching change prior to last season, with Juli Fulks moving up to Marshall in Division I, as associate head coach Hannah Varel took the reins of the program. But in spite of all that, along with having to replace four starters from a Final Four team, Transy managed to keep the streak alive last season. After stumbling on the road at Manchester in December, the Pioneers rattled off 13 straight HCAC wins, winning the league in convincing fashion at 16-1. They went on to capture a seventh straight HCAC Tournament title and nearly upset Trine in the first round of the national tournament, falling 81-74 in overtime. It doesn’t appear Transy is slowing down anytime soon, with Varel keeping the momentum rolling in Lexington.
Rhode Island College | Little East | Streak: 6 seasons

The Anchorwomen have been a mainstay atop the LEC for quite some time now with Jenna Cosgrove as head coach, holding the longest active regular season title streak of any program in Regions 1 or 2. Twice RIC has gone perfect in league play (2020-21, 2023-24), with their 16-0 mark—and 29-1 overall record—in 2023-24 standing out as perhaps the most successful season in the program’s 48-year history. But the key to ending up on this list is being able to reload and fill voids left by graduating seniors on a regular basis, something we saw from RIC last winter. With the graduations of three starters, including WBCA All-Americans Sophia Guerrier and Izabelle Booth, after 2023-24, Cosgrove had a major challenge on her hands looking towards 2024-25. But Madison Medbury and Angelina Nardolillo—the two returning starters—stepped into even bigger roles, while freshmen Jaina Yekelchik and Naima Bleou, and sophomore Meagan Schuermann, delivered plenty of quality minutes. RIC kept its streak intact by winning a share of the LEC title, tied with a grad student-heavy Mass Dartmouth squad at 14-2. With Mass Dartmouth graduating over 80% of its production, LEC Tournament champ Southern Maine bringing back only about 60% its production, and Medbury and Nardolillo both gone at RIC, the LEC looks wide-open heading into 2025-26. But with the young talent that developed over the course of last season, I’m not sure there’s any other team I’d pick to win this league over RIC.
Webster | St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic | Streak: 6 seasons

Like RIC, Webster’s streak is on the books for another season by way of the Gorloks sharing the regular season title with Westminster (MO) last season. Both went 17-1, splitting the season’s home-and-home series against each other, as Webster turned in its fifth consecutive 20-win season, and did so with three new starters. Interestingly, it was the first time since the streak began in 2019 that Webster didn’t win the title outright, as the Gorloks have more or less been an easy favorite in the SLIAC for the last half decade. It needs to be noted that the SLIAC hasn’t been amongst the strongest leagues in the country in that span, ranking no higher than No. 34 in Massey’s conference ratings over the past 10 years. But managing to keep the caliber of play high for this length of time is still a credit to the program head coach Jordan Olufson has going, especially as Westminster and Greenville have seriously challenged the Gorloks for the SLIAC title at multiple points over the last six years. Webster also has a 31-game home winning streak that they will carry into 2025-26, seeking their third straight season with a perfect record in Grant Gymnasium.
But wait! There’s one more…
Christopher Newport | Coast-to-Coast | Streak: 6 seasons*
Here’s the deal. CNU is not on my list of the Top 5 streaks because the C2C doesn’t officially play a conference schedule. While many of the C2C schools do play each other annually, those contests are counted as non-conference games. As a result, there’s no official C2C regular season champion. But if I didn’t mention CNU, it’d certainly be a glaring omission, considering the Captains’ exceptional consistency over the last several years. So I went through and calculated “conference records” for each of the C2C programs since 2021 (when the conference was rebranded and adopted its current model). Unsurprisingly, CNU came out on top in each of the last four seasons, making the Captains the de-facto C2C regular season champion (since 2021, CNU is 21-0 against C2C opponents in the regular season). But prior to that, the Capital Athletic Conference (which then became the C2C) played a true conference schedule, which is where CNU’s current streak began. After finishing as the runner-up to Marymount in 2017-18, CNU clinched the CAC title outright a year later, going 11-3, followed by a perfect 10-0 mark in 2019-20. At this point, it’s hard to see anyone else getting close to unseating CNU as the C2C’s annual preseason favorite, and even with losing several key upperclassmen to graduation, I expect the Captains to be far and away the C2C’s strongest team against in 2025-26.
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