The controversial 9 a.m. game on the second day of the Southern Conference women’s basketball tournament may remain for the next two years.

The men’s and women’s tournaments have been a major topic of discussion at this week’s SoCon spring meetings in Hilton Head, S.C., and the athletic directors will vote on the tournaments’ future formats today, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga athletic director Rick Hart said.

Under the current format the second game of the first day was the No. 7 vs. No. 10 women’s matchup — which typically took the floor around 5:30 p.m. — and the winner of that game advanced to play the No. 2 seed at 9 the following morning.

That’s no picnic for the first-round winner, which gets about a 12-hour break before returning to the arena. It’s also far from ideal for the No. 2 seed, said Samford athletic director Bob Roller, whose Bulldogs lost to UTC in the final game of this year’s regular season — a game that decided the conference champion and the tournament’s top two seeds.

“We were one game from winning the conference championship, and the next thing you know you’re eating breakfast at about 6 a.m. and playing a game at 9,” Roller said.

The 9 a.m. game is expected to remain for next year’s tournament in Charlotte, N.C., and for the 2011 tournament at UTC. The early game on the second day — there are six games played that day, which is the reason for the early start — will still involve the No. 2 seed, but the plan, Lady Mocs coach Wes Moore said, is for the No. 7 vs. No. 10 game to be the first game on opening day.

Moore said the coaches also voted to move the game times up two hours so that the first game will start at 1 p.m. Beyond 2011, the SoCon is looking at using two venues at the same time, which would eliminate the need for the 9 a.m. game.

Other format changes for future tournaments discussed were limiting the number of participants to eight teams, or playing first-round games on the higher seed’s home floor. Hart said the number of teams invited “could potentially change (today), but I don’t think it will.”

A proposal to switch the women’s conference schedule from 20 games to an 18-game slate — which would be unbalanced, meaning all teams wouldn’t play each other twice — was narrowly approved by the coaches.

Moore is adamantly against it, “because I feel like you get a true champion” with the 20-game schedule, he said. Moore’s Lady Mocs have won or shared the past 10 SoCon regular-season titles.

Even though the coaches got a majority vote for the switch, that’s no guarantee that the athletic directors will approve it, Hart said.

“There wasn’t much of a consensus about it,” he said. “Part of the reason for the 18-game schedule is that some games fall during exam periods and that’s problematic, but I think there are other solutions out there.

“Going to an unbalanced schedule is the exact opposite direction that the other sports are trying to go. They’re all looking for equality in their schedules, and I think we should keep it in women’s basketball.”