From now until the end of the regular season you may well see a lot of Division III buzzwords floating about on our front page, here in the Daily Dose and on our message boards. Pool A, Pool B, Pool C, OWP, OOWP … what do those all mean?

Pool A, Pool B and Pool C are the labels given to groups (also known as Pools) of bids awarded to the playoffs. The field is 61 men’s teams and 64 women’s teams culminating in the Final Four and national title games in Salem, Va. (men) and Bloomington, Ill. (women).

Understanding Pool A is fairly simple — let’s just pretend that ‘A’ stands for automatic. Those are the automatic bids that are awarded. There are 42 conferences with men’s automatic bids and 43 conferences with women’s automatic bids. Every conference other than the UAA awards its automatic bid to the winner of a conference tournament.

If you are not in one of those conferences, there is one bid set aside for you, which is what’s referred to as Pool B. The best team out of that group, which includes independents and (for men only) the Great South Athletic Conference teams, gets a bid as well.

Every eligible team not already selected is dropped into Pool C, which consists of 18 men’s and 20 women’s at-large bids. At-large bids are determined using the NCAA’s criteria, which includes regional winning percentage, strength of schedule, head-to-head competition, results against common opponents and results against regionally ranked teams.

If your conference has an automatic bid and your team doesn’t win it, then you are only eligible for Pool C bids. If your conference doesn’t have an automatic bid, you are eligible for Pool B or, if you don’t make that cut, Pool C.

Q: Why is the women’s tournament 64 but the men’s only 61?
A: There are more schools with women’s basketball teams than men’s basketball teams. As more schools join Division III (or more women’s-only schools go co-ed), the men’s tournament will grow to 64. In fact, we only need one more eligible team to get a 62-team men’s basketball NCAA Tournament field.

Q: How can my team guarantee it will get into the playoffs?
A: Win your conference’s automatic bid. There’s no guarantees otherwise.

Q: If the two best teams are in the same region, will they be placed in separate brackets?
A: This is at least possible, but highly unlikely. They don’t seed this tournament like a D-I tournament, unfortunately. Teams are placed in groups according to geography and seeded, though keeping teams from having to travel 500 miles in the first round is more important to the NCAA than maintaining proper matchups. We can expect from history that the women’s basketball committee will do its best to separate the top teams. The history in men’s basketball is mixed at best.

Q: There are a lot of criteria to go through. How can I tell where my team stands?
A: The NCAA releases regional rankings over the final weeks of the regular season, starting today. However, being No. 6 in one region doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ahead of a team that’s No. 7 in one of the other seven.

Q: So if I’m ranked seventh in these rankings, I’m in the playoffs?
A: No. There are still the 42/43 automatic bids. They’ll all get in first. Take the automatic bids out of the rankings (and keep in mind some conferences don’t have anyone in these rankings) and one Pool B team, then the remaining 18/20 get in.

Q: We’re ranked in the D3hoops.com Top 25. Since the bracket has more than 60 teams, we should be in, right?
A: Unfortunately, no. We would love to be able to say that’s the case, but remember that there are still all those automatic bids. Plus, the NCAA doesn’t agree with us as to who the best at-large teams are.

Q: Can you explain more about the various playoff selection/regional ranking criteria?
A: Absolutely. We have a whole section of our FAQ devoted to the NCAA Tournament, with that and game dates and the list of conferences with automatic bids.

Q: I have a question you haven’t answered. What do I do?
A: E-mail info@d3sports.com and/or post below in the comments section.

NCAA · Pool B · Pool C · primer · Regional rankings · Tournament

When the NCAA releases its first regional rankings this week, the Kean women are a lock to be No. 1 in the Atlantic. They are 17-2 and neither of those loses — one to Division I Rutgers and one to Illinois Wesleyan — counts in region. They’ve been atop the regional rankings before and reached the Elite 8 three of the last four seasons. What does Kean need to do to take that next step to the Final Four? What lessons did coach Michele Sharp learn from the Elite 8 loses against Oglethorpe in 2008 and Rochester in 2010? And which non-conference opponent does Kean hope to keep on the schedule for years to come? Find out in our interview with Sharp following Saturday’s win against William Paterson.

Click the play button below to listen.

Interview with Kean Coach Michele Sharp [ 9:18 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Amherst · Kean

Dave McHugh, Gordon Mann and I are headed to Las Vegas this week for the second iteration of the D3hoops.com Classic. Gordon and Dave live in the Mid-Atlantic snow zone, so we hope they get there.

But this isn’t the first D3hoops.com Classic. A decade ago at this time, we were hosting a D3hoops.com Classic ourselves at Catholic U., in Washington, D.C. Mike Lonergan, who was then the men’s basketball coach and is now the head coach at Vermont, approached me a few months earlier after having lost a title sponsor for his holiday tournament, asking if we would step in for the sum of $2,000. Catholic won the tournament, with Hobart, Plymouth State and Roger Williams. Catholic went on to win the national title that year. So there’s precedent!

Somewhere I still have a t-shirt or two. We broadcast the games on the Internet — audio only, since this was 2000, but it was not particularly widespread at the time. And we still recorded games on cassette tape at the time. For a couple years thereafter, we got emails from schools asking if we were going to do another one, but it was a one-time shot.

Those were great times for us. A year earlier we had launched D3football.com and it was a great success. But the dot-com crash was about to hit, and that $2,000 nearly bankrupted us. This time, the tournament is run by Sport Tours International, it’s in Las Vegas (30 degrees warmer than Minneapolis!) and we’re going to have three Top 25 men’s teams and one Top 25 women’s team in the building.

That is, if they all get out of the snow zone themselves! Coverage starts today with No. 4 UW-Stevens Point taking on No. 20 Ramapo. You can get more coverage of the Classic, including live video, on our Classic page and we will post stories and such throughout.

Catholic · D3hoops.com Classic

Chapman forward Justin Riley joins us for a second season as a blogger, after a year in which he helped lead the Panthers to the second round of the NCAA Tournament. His first blog post of the season follows.

It was a sunny spring day when I first walked onto Chapman University’s campus. I had informed the head coach the previous day that I would be coming to play open gym with the team. As I roamed the campus looking for the coach’s office, I had a feeling that the coaching staff didn’t care too much that I was coming. No one was there to greet me when I arrived; no one picked up my phone calls. Nothing.

Eventually, I asked a random student where the coach’s offices were and luckily he pointed me in the right direction. On the walk there, the uneasiness I felt turned into anger. For the first time in my basketball career, I felt that I didn’t really matter. After 15 minutes of searching, asking, and wondering where the coach was, I finally found an assistant coach and headed to the gym. As I was preparing to lace up my shoes and take the court, the head coach walked in with a recruit and his parents.

At that moment my feelings were reaffirmed—I didn’t really matter.

I took the court with an added sense of motivation to prove not only to myself, but to the coaching staff, that I was the best player in that gym.

And not to my surprise, the coaching staff agreed. And the rest is history!

Three and half years later, I stand toe-to-toe with my teammate of eight years, Griffin Ramme, ready to lead Chapman University to another successful season and NCAA Division III tournament bid. At the end of last season, we had our doubts of how good we would be. Graduating three seniors, two of whom were four-year starters, is not an easy reality to overcome, yet we remained optimistic. Individual workouts, weightlifting sessions, adult league games and basketball camps filled up the summer; but an uneasy feeling of our team’s future still loomed.

School started.

Open gym started.

Our team would be composed of those who showed up at the gym every afternoon at 1:00 to showcase their “new and improved” abilities, myself included.

With over a month of intense 5-on-5 games and team practices rapidly approaching, I still wasn’t convinced that we could duplicate last season’s performance.

October 15 was here.

There was nothing more anyone could do. The countless hours spent in the gym boiled down to this very moment: practice.

Practice, practice, and more practice.

Was my senior season going to be a memorable one filled with great experiences, or a year of rebuilding highlighted with struggle and tough defeats? I can’t answer this question in its entirety, but I can confidently say that the once uneasy feeling dancing in my stomach no longer exists. After the first few days of practice, it was clear there was more talent in the gym compared to last year. And the only thing missing was exactly that: practice.

Three weeks into my senior campaign, we stand with a 6-1 record, with our only loss coming to last year’s NAIA Division 1 runner up, Azusa Pacific University. This past weekend, we claimed the Lee Fulmer Tournament Championship for the second consecutive season, defeating Redlands in the finals. December marks a crucial month for us as we have six Division III games, five of which are against teams in the West region.

I never realized how quickly four seasons would go by, but as a co-captain and senior leader, I am excited for this final collegiate journey I will take with my teammates and only hope that we remain positive, practice hard, and stay focused on our goal to have the opportunity to play again in March.

Justin Riley

The announcement today of Shenandoah joining the Old Dominion Athletic Conference has the potential to restart the rearrangement of conference affiliations that started with the departure of football schools from the MAC, the creation of the Landmark Conference for all sports and has reached as far north as the Empire 8 and Liberty League.

Shenandoah’s departure, which takes effect with the 2012-13 season, leaves the USA South in a big hole. All of their men’s sports, other than football, face the potential of losing their automatic bid. Just six full-time members of the conference have men’s sports: Averett, Christopher Newport, Ferrum, Greensboro, Methodist and North Carolina Wesleyan. In football, Maryville is an associate member of the USA South, leaving the conference with the minimum seven members required for an automatic bid.

After a two-year grace period, the automatic bid could be lost in 2014-15.

Could this revive the dormant, some would say dead, USAC-Great South merger talks? Absolutely. The USA South’s Maryville is already an associate member of the league in football and could join for all sports, as could Piedmont and LaGrange. Piedmont is the closest school of the southern portion of the GSAC to the USAC footprint.

If the southern flank of the USA South opens up, might Christopher Newport be the next to leave? The Captains would be the next geographic outlier in this group and, in my opinion, are a good fit for the Capital Athletic Conference. They would also bring a football program that could put the CAC on the verge of being a football conference. Stevenson adds football in 2012, while Salisbury, Frostburg and Wesley already have the sport. Five football programs isn’t seven, but it’s in the ballpark and who knows, Pool B might not be so bad a place to be for a while in football.

Plus, remember the women’s programs in the USA South and the Great South vastly outnumber the men’s. They could well spin off and form their own conference which would be eligible for an automatic bid as well. That group could draw from the following schools: Agnes Scott, Mary Baldwin, Meredith, Peace, Salem, Spelman, Wesleyan (Ga.). They might find that type of affiliation more to their liking.

The MAC had to be considered a strong contender to land Shenandoah. The conference already is home to a handful of Shenandoah’s sports: field hockey and men’s and women’s indoor track and track and field. The conference added Stevenson as an affiliate member for football and Shenandoah would have made it 10 in that sport. But the MAC missed out.

MAC · Mid-Atlantic Shuffle · ODAC · Shenandoah · USA South