A handful of schools have yet to release a 2005 schedule, but we’ve gotten final schedules from Newport News, Ursinus and Gustavus Adolphus over the past week. About half of the schedules still missing are from the NESCAC, which only affects the teams on that little island anyway.

The Gustavus folks say they still might have an announcement soon about adding a tenth game. If so, it might have to be a long trip, or someone from outside Division III, or Crown, or a second game against St. Thomas. Either that or Northwestern is looking to play three games in one day. (For those who missed it, the first-year provisional members are already taking on mighty Trinity Bible and Macalester on the same day, Oct. 8.)

There are some games which we know must exist, but just don’t know for sure when. We assume Rochester and Worcester Polytech will play each other this year, since both are in the Liberty League. Rowan would be expected to play Kean, right?

Millsaps only has eight games at this point. Well, they have nine games listed on their own Web site, but one of the schools on the list, “Concordia (AL)”, doesn’t appear to have varsity football.

One school sent us a schedule that claimed it was playing SUNY-Maritime in its opener this year. Interesting, considering Maritime doesn’t play varsity football until 2006.

Montclair State and Huntingdon are still an opponent short after the Thomas More/PAC fallout. You know, considering that the PAC appears intent on adding more teams — “Long-term, we envision a PAC with 8-10 members … we expect to reach our desired membership level in the near future,” said the leader of the conference’s presidents council — if I were a coach, I’d be very leery about scheduling ANY teams in that conference right now. Who would want to be caught in the next PAC land grab?

And in closing, even though we haven’t asked for them yet, we have received two 2005 season previews. So dig in!

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There are three open head coaching jobs that we’re aware of, and here’s what we know about them:

Kings Point (3-7, 3-4 Liberty League in 2004)
Tim McNulty resigned at the end of March and the school intends to introduce his replacement tomorrow afternoon. All indications from the rumor mill point to Mike Toop, head coach at Division I-AA non-scholarship Davidson. Toop is an alumnus of the institution, also known as the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. He’s 17-22 at Davidson, which has moved recently to playing almost exclusively I-AA schools instead of mostly I-AA and a handful of D-IIIs.

Pomona-Pitzer (4-5, 3-3 SCIAC)
Roger Caron left the school in early April to coach at Cheshire Academy in Cheshire, Conn. The school still has his name on the Web site and his voice and name are still on the voice mail. That’s because Pomona-Pitzer believes Caron is taking a one-year leave of absence, according to athletic director Charles Katsiaficas, who expects Caron to return next spring. Scott Rynne will coach the team in 2005.

Waynesburg (7-4, 3-2 PAC)
Jeff Hand left for conference rival Westminster (Pa.). The school says it intends to go through a search and hire a “permanent” replacement but time is awful short for that.

Also, Brent Becker was named interim head coach at Lake Forest in February, but will be coaching there in 2005. A search will begin at the end of the season.

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Tell me you don’t feel the same way.

I’m definitely ready for football to start. I’ve ridden the high from Division III basketball as much as I can. I love major league baseball, but that’s not the same. But it’s been almost five months since the Stagg Bowl, and football needs to start.

It’s the worst time of the year. The NFL Draft is done. Schedules are basically finished. Graduations litter the May schedule … and it’s still more than three months until kickoff!

Don’t get me wrong — I enjoy the opportunity to spend extra time with my kids, especially with the newborn taking up a lot of our time. The lawn needs to be cut. The kids like to play outside. I need to get the brakes checked and some tires replaced after putting another umpteen hundred miles on the cars during the football and basketball season. But it’s a long time until kickoff and I’m sitting here ready to go.

Let’s skip June and July and get it on.

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Folks in Indiana have been well aware; people in neighboring states, not always. But with most of Indiana refusing to observe Daylight Savings Time, it’s been a curse on football schedule-makers.

For those who don’t know, most of Indiana, the part in the Eastern Time Zone, has not observed Daylight Savings Time, the time between the beginning of April and the end of October in which most of the USA turns its clocks forward one hour. Therefore, games scheduled in Indiana from Weeks 1-9 actually start one hour later to those based in Michigan, Ohio, etc.

Most of the Indiana schools get their schedules right year-in and year-out. They know that if a game starts at 1:30 in Ohio, then they need to list it as 12:30 on their schedule if listing it in Indiana time. But it often confuses opposing schedule-makers, who will list a 1:30 Indiana Time game as 1:30, rather than 2:30, and say “All Times Eastern.”

It even causes headaches on our schedule, since the change in time comes during the football season. We have to manually change the clocks between Week 9 and Week 10, when Indiana comes back into line. It also affects people calling the NCAA’s national office, in Indianapolis.

Thankfully, starting in 2006, this will no longer be an issue. The state’s legislature passed a law restoring Daylight Savings Time in Indiana for the first time since the early 1970s.

We can hardly wait.

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Some of Division III’s newest programs — including one that won’t play a varsity game until 2006 and another that isn’t playoff eligible until 2008 — lead the list of destinations announced by recent recruits.

Tavares (FL) High School seniors Ryan Leary and Danny McManus will enroll at SUNY-Maritime (Coach Clayton Kendrick-Holmes standing to right in photo). The Throggs Neck, Long Island-based school announced it will compete as a club team in 2005 and play a varsity schedule in 2006. Tavares teammate Matt Habermehl will attend Millikin University.

North Carolina Wesleyan, which enjoyed a 4-4 inaugural season in 2004, will get a pair of New Bern (NC) High School teammates as Joey Belviy and A.J. Glenn announced plans to suit up for the Battling Bishops this season.

Belviy led New Bern in sacks and tackles for loss last season despite standing just 5’6. “It means a lot to me because I really didn’t think I’d get the chance at first because of my height and size,” he recently told the New Bern Sun Journal.

Bradford (FL) High School’s Milton Sumpter will attend Tri-State University, which is entering the second season of a four-year transitional period in its move from NAIA to NCAA.

“I want to thank God for giving me the ability, I want to thank my parents for letting me play and I want to thank my coaches because they taught me a lot, even off the field,” Sumpter told the Bradford County Telegraph.

While Sumpter will pick up some frequent flyer miles traveling from Florida to Indiana, they won’t compare to those racked up by Joe Quinn when he leaves home in Anchorage, Alaska to attend Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Quinn is a two-sport athlete at West Anchorage High School where he plays goalie on the soccer team. “Goalie is kind of the closest soccer position you can get to football,” Quinn quoted to the Anchorage Daily News in this interesting feature. “It’s kind of a seamless transition.”

Of course, we’re only assuming Quinn will fly to JHU. He might choose to make the 76 hour, 4,316-mile trip by car instead.

Elsewhere:

- Paraclete (CA) HS senior Domenic Donato will enroll at Chapman.

- Stevenson (CA) HS seniors Ashton Clarke and Philip Trapp will play for Claremont-Mudd-Scripps while attending Claremont McKenna College.

- Montour (PA) HS senior Ernie Ricci goes to Dickinson.

- Highlands (OH) HS senior Chris Owens will go to Earlham while teammates Bert Bathiany and Shaun Matisak head to Ohio Northern and Weston Lawrence enrolls at Wittenberg.

- Pinkerton (NH) Academy senior Nate Gooden will attend Plymouth State.

For a list of other recruits and their college destinations, click here.

If you want to share recruiting news, feel free to do so using the comments feature below. But don’t forget that you need to post the link to the newspaper story so we can verify the information.

Otherwise we’ll make you chauffer Joe Quinn from Baltimore to Anchorage over Christmas break.

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