HOUGHTON – Michigan Tech fans will have two years to prepare for a very different-looking Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.

A month after Malone University announced its intention to leave the GLIAC for the Great Midwest Athletic Conference, five other schools officially followed suit Monday, reducing the league’s footprint significantly, particularly in Ohio.

The schools departing after the 2016-17 school year include Walsh, Ohio Dominican, Lake Erie, Findlay and Hillsdale.

Travel, as well as a desire for a league composed of similarly sized private schools, was repeatedly cited by the exiting schools.

“We’re not leaving because we’re dissatisfied with the GLIAC. It’s the opportunity to build an all-private conference with quality schools that is mostly regional,” Walsh athletic director Dale Howard said to the Canton Repository Monday. “It’s competing in a conference with all like institutions. There will be no state schools in it, so as we’re developing policies and procedures, it will be through the private schools’ lens.”

The current longest road trip in the conference is Tech to Malone, a distance of 750 miles. After summer 2017, the Huskies’ longest trip will be Ashland, 689 miles away in north-central Ohio. The longest trip in the new G-MAC will be from Hillsdale to Trevecca Nazarene in Nashville, Tennessee, a distance of 487 miles, mostly on Interstate highway.

The GLIAC was established in 1972, with Tech joining in 1980. Monday’s announcement marked the first schools to exit the league, currently at 16 teams, since Gannon and Mercyhurst did in 2008.

The G-MAC began play in 2012 and has eight current members based in Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia, all of whom are private schools with enrollments under 3,500 students, which is less than half that of Michigan Tech. Of the remaining 10 GLIAC schools, all but three (Tiffin, Ashland and Northwood) are public, and only Lake Superior State and Northwood have enrollments of less than 3,000.

Five of the six schools leaving joined the conference relatively recently: Findlay in 1997, Ohio Dominican and Lake Erie in 2010, Walsh and Malone in 2012.

The departure of Hillsdale may be the most surprising, as the Chargers have been GLIAC members since 1975 (five years before Tech joined in 1980).

Not only is Hillsdale the longest-tenured, it may be the strongest athletic department in recent history. The Chargers have won at least a division championship in each of the league’s four biggest sports in which Tech competes – football, volleyball and men’s and women’s basketball – since 2009.

Findlay has been dominant in men’s basketball, with seven regular-season and eight GLIAC Tournament championships, with modest success within the league’s South Division in a few other sports.

Ohio Dominican has recently become a football power, winning the GLIAC title in 2013 and going 18-1 in league play over the last two seasons, while success has been modest at best for LEC, Walsh and Malone.

“The GLIAC appreciates the contributions made by these institutions throughout the years in making our league one of the top Division II conferences in the country,” GLIAC commissioner Dell Robinson said Monday in a prepared statement released from the league offices in Bay City.

“We look forward to the process of restructuring the GLIAC and are excited about our future opportunities as a conference.”

Public schools from Michigan have had the lion’s share of success in the recent era. Tiffin was the only Ohio school to win a GLIAC crown in 2014-15, which it did in men’s soccer and men’s golf.

What remains after 2017 is a smaller, but still fairly strong, league of 10 teams, eight in Michigan.

Notable in its absence from the list of departures is Ashland, located in north central Ohio. According to the Ashland Times-Gazette, AU was offered the same opportunity, declined, and is not interested in leaving the GLIAC.

“We’ve never been as successful both athletically and academically as we are now, so when you look at that, the first thing you wonder is, why would you go against that (by changing conferences)? And the GLIAC’s national reputation right now is extremely high,” Ashland athletic director Al King told the Times-Gazette.

Ashland won a national championship in women’s basketball in 2013 and was the highest-ranked private school, finishing second overall behind only Grand Valley, in the 2014-15 Learfield Sports Directors’ Cup, a national measure of Division II sports excellence across the board.

The GLIAC will have nine football schools in fall 2017, nine in softball, eight in women’s soccer and just six in baseball.