Little Three
Little Three is a term started by and used in reference to athletic competition between three private liberal arts colleges in the New England region of the United States: Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts; Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut; and Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The exact origin of the term Little Three is lost to history, but was used by the three colleges in an allusion to the Big Three, coined in the 1880s to describe the three big universities—Harvard, Princeton, and Yale—which dominated football in the Ivy League. The earliest known reference appeared in John Hallahan's Football in New England Colleges in 1923: "Williams College again won the championship of the Little Three, which includes Wesleyan and Amherst . .