in women's gymnastics the conference dropped the sport. The WAC also added men's soccer in order to maintain its status as a Division I conference, recruiting four schools from the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation soccer league to join the three WAC members that sponsored the sport at that time. Mid-American Conference On April 19, 2011, several media outlets reported that the University of Massachusetts Amherst (also known as UMass) would upgrade its football program to FBS level and become an affiliate member of the Mid-American Conference (MAC), effective in 2013, for that sport only. The formal announcement came the following day at a joint UMass–MAC press conference; the effective date of UMass' move was 2012, with full FBS membership and eligibility for the conference championship coming in 2013. The school continues to maintain all other current conference affiliations, mostly in the Atlantic 10 Conference. At the time of the announcement, the A10 was also home to Temple University, whose football team was in the MAC; however, by the time UMass football arrived in the MAC, Temple's football program had left for the Big East, and that school had announced that the rest of its athletic program would join the Big East a year later. As a part of this football upgrade, the Minutemen moved from the 17,000-seat Warren McGuirk Alumni Stadium on its Amherst campus, whose capacity is only modestly above the NCAA's requirement of 15,000 average attendance for FBS football. As of 2012, they play their home games away at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, the 69,000-seat home of the NFL's New England Patriots and the New England Revolution of MLS. UMass is expanding McGuirk Stadium to a capacity of 25,000, and hopes to eventually return at least some games to campus, but was contractually obligated to play all of its home games in 2012 and 2013, plus four games in each season from 2014 to 2016, at Gillette Stadium. The Minutemen played two seasons as a football affiliate before being offered full membership in the MAC. However, UMass declined, and shortly afterward, the MAC announced the Minutemen would no longer be an affiliate with them effective for the 2015 season, instead playing as an FBS Independent. Ultimately, this meant that despite these changes in football membership, the MAC was the only FBS conference whose full-time membership did not change during the realignment cycle (its core membership also did not