“Congratulations,” Ralph.

In my most cynical moments, I fight to urge to scream at the “indifference” that “Indianapolis” (for lack of a better term) shows for D-III. We make the wisecracks about the errors in the D-III Championship Handbooks that are made by the intern from some D-I school, who got a big important NCAA job to impress his/her hometown friends.

I wish that we had a “champion” at the NCAA who ran the “D-III” ship as tightly as we would like it to be run. I wish that our “D-III adminstrative staff” burned with the same desire that we have for the student-athletes in D-III. I wish that their “9-to-5″ was more than just a job! If it is more than just a job, then I just don’t see it from here in the attention to details in the most visible measures of competency, such as the printed word, Championship Handbooks.

I rail at the times that the NCAA has not implemented all of the bureaucrat-centric drivel that appears in the news releases.

Indianapolis doesn’t seem to identify and implement “best practices”

They do not seem to have a “Division-wide feel” for the way things are presented across the sports, at least to the casual fans. I hope that the AD’s, the Senior Woman Administrators, and SID’s do not have the same complaints.

They definitely do not have an air of transparency about their transactions.

Adopting transparency and “open access” allows smart enthusiastic “fans” of D-III to contribute to the workload of the division. How many D-III fans on these forums has one seen who could make major contributions to the conducting of the championships of the sports. In a division whose major asset is the love of the game by its fans, why not tap into that asset? The way that the information is accumulated, analyzed and interpreted on the message boards, the spirit of the effort is to get the job right! “Transparently right”! Our contributors eagerly ask for proofreading and double-checking of the calculations and data. We are D-III. We are about the student-athlete. We are about the experience. “We are family”.

On the “Shirts, stickers and decals” message board, I enjoy reading about the D-III fans that AF4 (a veterinarian who travels the country in a professional capacity) encounters. It is the camaraderie that Pat Coleman mentions at a “Stone Station”. It is trying to place the face with the name of that person on the message board when he/she has driven 200 miles for a game at “your place”.

I hope that the NCAA will recognize that they need a “Champion” for D-III, that D-III may be the most vibrantly active division of the NCAA. D-III seems to “move mountains with teaspoons” in its joy of what it offers for its student-athletes. Please NCAA. Give us someone with vision, with the authority and the ability to move those mountains, to tap into the energy and wisdom that D-III fans have for “our division”. We want to make the D-III experience better, every season, every sport, every time.

However, the member schools vote on and make the rules. So it’s not like some penny-pincher in Indianapolis is creating the rules; they’re enforcing what Division III schools have said they want.

Whether this past year’s tournament is what those schools had in mind when they voted in this radical new national playoff system for the 1999-200 academic school year is another question.

I think, as you said, the NCAA does a great job in many areas. I think one thing I would add that I’m really disappointed, and this is the coach in me, is that the actual staff that works at the NCAA National Office doesn’t really care about Division III. They’re understaffed, and some of the staff there is quite incompetent (hence your observation on the handbooks). I think when we sometimes say ‘the NCAA does a great job’ it’s not really the NCAA. It’s staff at Hope or in Salem that put on these events and do a great job, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with the actual professional staff out of Indy.

Just my $.02. If you think things are screwed up in terms of bid allocations, championship handbooks, etc., you should try to cover (my sport)!

I appreciate what you say about the tournament experience, but the funding for that still comes from the NCAA and the membership, and that is something the NCAA does seem to have some genuine interest in. I also draw that from talking with members of the overall championships committee (not just basketball, but the overall Division III committee), who really do want to make sure the kids come away with a big-time feel.

Obviously, I can’t speak to anything other than basketball and football from personal experience, and other sports certainly can have different levels of attention paid to them.

And I COMPLETELY agree about the staff’s attention to Division III. There’s no reason we should have better data (regional records, OWP and OOWP) for championships purposes but we seem to, year after year, in basketball.