Tech's basketball teams know they have only three more weeks of winter. They can't play past their sixth - and last - Mid-South Conference regular season due to NAIA suspension from postseason play.

However, the Golden Bears feel like their programs will come in from the cold starting next season. Their declaration of NAIA independence with an exit from the Kentucky-rooted Mid-South has opened doors.

Back in the fall - about the time the school's last football season began - Tech announced it was going to remain in the NAIA but also was joining the United States Collegiate Athletic Association.

The USCAA, based in Newport News, Va., is not really the alphabet soup in which Tech wants to swim. That was - and remains - the NCAA, as a Division II member returning to the West Virginia Conference.

The Golden Bears have bid twice for a return to NCAA play and failed, and all it's gotten Tech is a one-year sitdown from NAIA postseason play because of that initial 2010 NCAA application.

So, Tech athletics thought the USCAA - a group of schools with enrollments of less than 2,000 - a viable option. In these parts, it's kind of like a trip into the unknown.

However, the move also gives the school's athletes a chance at three postseasons, in the USCAA, NAIA and with the Association of Independent Institutions (AII), the indies within the NAIA, like Mountain State of Beckley and other Tech opponents in some sports like Southern Virginia and Kentucky Christian.

"Our primary motivation in joining the USCAA was we didn't want to go two years in a row without being eligible for postseason play or a conference tournament," Tech Athletic Director Frank Pergolizzi said Thursday. "We have multiple ways to get to the postseason this way.

"What it doesn't do is give us a (conference) schedule, but in one way, that's not a bad thing. It gives us total control of our schedules. And when I gave our coaches a list of guidelines on scheduling, the No. 1 thing was to try and schedule as many West Virginia schools as possible."

The Legislature-mandated axing of Tech football will trim an athletic budget of $2.7 million, Pergolizzi said, but since the process of building a budget for the next fiscal year has just started, he couldn't say what a new number would be.

He does know Tech will be more competitive in the USCAA than it has been in an NAIA conference, and it won't be any more expensive (travel) to play USCAA foes instead of the Mid-South.

Besides, Tech will still try to play some Mid-South opponents, like Rio Grande, Shawnee State and Pikeville as well as WVC teams that are willing to go home-and-home.

Pergolizzi also knows the Golden Bears must win more across the board than they have been in the Mid-South.

Part of the NCAA application process is listing athletic team records over the past three seasons, "and as gifted as our written words may have been (in the application process), you can't smooth over some things."

Pergolizzi said it wasn't lost on Tech that among the schools that have been admitted to NCAA Division II during the two years the Montgomery school has come up short, the large majority of those had conference affiliation in their pocket.

Tech doesn't have that from the WVC, and the conference's bylaws prohibit the admission of a school until it passes NCAA muster.

So, the latest effort to drum up support from Tech's former WVC peers - the school bolted the league hastily back in 2006 after being an 80-year, founding member - could come from Carolyn Long, Tech's new campus executive officer and former WVC Board of Governors chair.

Long has deep connections in state education and in the State Capitol. But some of the feelings toward Tech's exit from the WVC remain a sort spot, and will need significant salving if Tech is to even have a chance to return to an affiliation it never should have left.

Pergolizzi made it sound unlikely that Tech would apply to the NCAA for a third straight summer, although there is no limit to the number of times a school can apply.

"It doesn't make much sense for us to go forward without that (affiliation commitment) from the WVIAC," the Tech AD said. "Having said that, with all of the stuff that's been going on here, with all of the transition on our campus, I'm sure the last thing on most of the leadership's mind is what conference we're in, or should be in, next year."

And whether it's USCAA, NAIA, Mid-South or whatever, the regional relevancy of the Golden Bears program can't be any less with this switch than it has been in recent years.

As Pergolizzi said, "If we can't be in the WVIAC and we're going to play a lot of names people around here don't recognize, then we might as well win ... My personal opinion is we need to get some stability in the USCAA and win a few more games and it will help a lot."

Some will see this as Tech taking another step back athletically, but if that's so, then Pergolizzi knows maybe that has to happen for the Golden Bears to move forward.

"We're not giving up on getting in the WVIAC at all," he said.

If Tech can get from the USCAA to the NCAA, it will be a red-letter day on the Montgomery campus. Until then, in some ways, it will seem like Groundhog Day here, the same thing over and over, with the Golden Bears trying to get out of their own shadow.

Contact Sports Editor Jack Bogaczyk at ja...@dailymail.com or 304-348-7949.