Great match-ups all over the place this weekend.  You’ve got Messiah traveling to Virginia to face Christopher Newport in a rematch of last season’s amazing quarterfinal.  Stevens is playing at Swarthmore, and Trinity is up against Hardin-Simmons and will try and get some momentum going after their surprising early loss.  Johns Hopkins has two matches and will try and come out at 6-0.  MIT is 3-1 and has 2 matches.  Ohio Wesleyan is 4-0 and plays in the addidas Classic.  Hobart is 3-0 with a couple of matches, and York playing North Carolina Wesleyan should be good.  And the NESCAC hasn’t even started yet!

On the women’s side, up and coming Puget Sound is in action, Wheaton (Ill.) is facing UW-Eau Claire, William Smith is hosting a solid tourney, including Johns Hopkins, and Chicago is 3-0 and faces a strong Illinois Wesleyan squad.  Lynchburg is facing Salisbury University, and Wartburg is up against St. Ben’s.

Check for updates often and add your comments on those matches I’ve overlooked.

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This email is heading off to all Division III Sports Information Directors. If you’re an SID, you should get it through Moravian SID Mark Fleming’s D-III email list. You will want to be on his list to get important notices, research questions and other emails of interest to all D-III schools, so if you’re new, make sure he has your address.

It should be distributed shortly. I’ve included it here without the particulars about logging in.

Dear SID:

Hoping this email finds you well. This will contain notes for all sports we cover: football, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s basketball and baseball. It is primarily a football note, however. There’s a lot here, so I broke it down as follows:

Covered in this email:
Team of the Week changes
Football game day info
Audio/video/live stats links, football and basketball
Basketball schedules
Twitter and Facebook
D3soccer.com Top 25
Links to our site and yours
What We’re Reading
All-Region deadlines, mark your calendar
Contact info

-> Team of the Week changes — We have a trade-out sponsor lined up for the D3football.com and D3hoops.com Team of the Week, something we’re not getting any money for but at least getting some exposure and use of some software that will make distributing info easier. We’re also moving the Team of the Week nomination form behind a login screen — we were getting too many spam or fan/parent nominations, plus, our new system will streamline the creation of the Team of the Week. Last year we lost the guy who had been doing the TOW for three or four years and I went back to choosing the team and assembling the pages myself. If you don’t have your D3sports login (what you use to nominate for our All-Americans and All-Region teams) contact me sooner rather than later. Those of you who have let coaches do the nominating will need to let me know if you want them to get usernames and passwords to access that function.

-> Football game day info — We would love to have all sorts of information on game day. Before the game, you can post a link to your game notes or preview through Presto, or post them in their entirety on our site with your D3sports login. The PrestoSports system is capable of handling in-progress scores, which will be updated automatically if you use Presto’s live stats software. Otherwise, you or someone on your game day crew can update scores as often as you like. Even if it’s just after every quarter, it’s of tremendous use to fans, who flock to our Scoreboard page all day long. After the game, we would love to have the final score and your game story, both of which can be posted through Presto’s space.

-> Audio/video/live stats links, football and basketball — if you have live video, live audio or live stats. We will publish your video links even if they are pay per view, so if you want to increase your audience, make sure you get the links on our scoreboard. That will require your PrestoSports login. You could email me your links and ask us to post them; however, we’ll do that on an as-time-permits basis. It’s going to be faster for you to post them yourself.

-> Basketball schedules — we have about two-thirds of the schedule on the site already. If you’re a Presto school or conference, remember we will get your schedule automatically when you post it for your conference. Please use “Site Notes” instead of “Notes” for notes about your games, whether they are homecoming, alumni day, senior day, whatever. That way those notes appear solely on your site and not on your opponents’ site (or ours).

-> Are you on Twitter? Are you following @d3hoops, @d3football, @d3baseball and are we following you? We follow every D-III athletics feed we can find and some of the general school feeds if they’re interesting. Please drop me a line if we aren’t following you. We’ll continue to retweet out interesting SID tweets, which will push people to your site instead of ours. Same with Facebook — D3football.com and D3hoops.com will become fans of your pages as we learn of them and hopefully yours will do the same.

-> D3soccer.com Top 25 — Some of you were approached about voting in our first soccer Top 25 poll. Jim Matson has been following up with SIDs on that list as well as coaches to make up the voter list. The poll should be released on Tuesdays during the regular season and we thank those of you who will be voting. Soccer game releases can be posted directly on D3soccer.com with your D3sports login.

-> Links to our site and yours — We already link to your site and we would love a link in return. (Men’s soccer links will be going on the site this month, with women’s to follow.) As more schools go with outside companies, we’ve lost a lot of the links we used to have from schools. Please consider linking to D3baseball.com, D3football.com, D3hoops.com and D3soccer.com from your appropriate sports’ main pages (and please note that the b, f, h and s are all lower-case). I can provide a logo 125 px wide to fit on most templates, but have not included it with this email to keep the size down.

-> What We’re Reading — We started linking to outside news sources’ stories last season with the What We’re Reading boxes. They appear on the front page of D3football and D3hoops and on the blogs for D3football, D3hoops and D3baseball. If you have an interesting feature story in your area, drop me a line with the link.

-> All-Region nomination deadlines, mark your calendar — Just an early heads-up: Football nomination deadline is Wednesday, Nov. 25. Basketball nomination deadline is Tuesday, March 9. We will absolutely send out more info closer to the end of the season.

-> Contact info
Football and basketball (and hopefully 2010 baseball) game day info:
Log in at Presto with Presto username and password.

All D3sports.com weekly, regional and national nominations, all soccer game stories, other non-game releases for all sports:
Log in at the respective D3sports.com data entry site with D3sports username and password:

Also, thanks to everyone who helped us with Kickoff 2009 on D3football.com, whether with a photo or helping us talk to your coach, some of them at the last minute. See you in Salem, or Bloomington, or Appleton, or Greensboro.

D3football.com, D3hoops.com: Pat Coleman
info@d3sports.com for general inquiries, news@d3sports.com for releases

D3soccer.com: Jim Matson
info@d3soccer.com for general inquiries, news@d3soccer.com for releases

D3baseball.com: Jim Dixon
info@d3baseball.com for general inquiries, news@d3baseball.com for releases

Pat Coleman
D3sports.com

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And what a season it should be.  New regions, new coaches, and some unmet expectations from 2009 hanging around.  We’ll be covering all of the action on both the men’s and women’s side, along with live match scores on our scoreboard.

Here are a few interesting reads on D3soccer from around the web…

The new soccer coach at UC-Santa Cruz isn’t really new.  Read more about men’s head coach Michael Runeare at the Slugs web site.  Messiah’s Brad McCarty is also a new coach who isn’t new.  Visit the Messiah site and read on.

As the first matches kick-off on Tuesday, you can read Kevin Scheitrum’s nice preview of the top men’s teams on the NCAA web site.  On the women’s side, UW-Stevens Point has found themselves with a fairly young team after going deep into the post-season last year.  Do they have a shot in 2009?  Scott Williams at the Stevens Point Journal has the write-up.

Good luck on Tuesday everyone!

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While the news about the realignment of the NCAA regions was released in 2008, many fans are still asking about the details behind the new regional alignments.  As there have been some fairly significant changes to the regions, including a brand new North Region, we thought that a complete list would help fans sort out the changes.  How will the new alignments affect your school?  Let us know.

North Region (new): IIAC, Midwest, and the MIAC.  Pool B includes the WIAC conference (no AQ), and Nebraska Wesleyan.  Also included are Bethany Lutheran, Crown, Martin Luther, North Central University, Minn-Morris, Northwestern College (MN), and St. Scholastica.

West Region: SCIAC, Northwest, American Southwest, and 5 in the SCAC – Austin, Colorado, Hendrix, Trinity, and Southwestern.  Pool B includes Cal State East Bay, UC-Santa Cruz, and Chapman.  La Sierra is provisional this season.

Central Region: SLIAC, MIAA, CCIW, NAC, 2 from the UAA – Chicago and Washington University, and 1 from the North Eastern Athletics Conference – University of Dallas.

Great Lakes Region: NCAC, Allegheny Mountain Conference, OAC, Heartland, PAC, 2 from the UAA – Carnegie Mellon and Case Western, and 2 from the SCAC – DePauw and Centre.

Mid-Atlantic Region: Colonial States, Commonwealth, Landmark, Centennial, Freedom, and 3 from the North Eastern Athletics Conference – Penn State Abington (provisional), Penn State Harrisburg (provisional), and Penn State Berks College.  The Pool B candidate is Lancaster Bible (provisional).

South Atlantic Region: ODAC, Capital Athletic Conference, USA South, NJAC, 5 from the SCAC – Millsaps, Oglethorpe, Rhodes, University of the South, and Birmingham-Southern (provisional), and 1 from the UAC – Emory.  The Pool B programs are Rust College, and the Great South Athletic Conference – Huntington, La Grange, Maryville (Tenn.), and Piedmont.

East Region: Liberty League, SUNYAC, Empire 8, CUNYAC, Skyline, 2 from the UAA – NYU and Rochester, 5 from the North Eastern Athletic Conference – Cazenovia, Keuka, SUNY-Utica/Rome, Wells, and SUNY-Cobleskill (provisional), and 3 from the Allegheny Mountain Conference – Hilbert, D’Youville, and Medaille.

New England Region: Little East, Commonwealth Coast, NESCAC, North Atlantic Conference, NEWMAC, Great Northeast, MSCAC, and 1 from the UAA – Brandeis.  The Pool B programs are Elms, Lesley, Becker, Daniel Webster, University of Main-Presque Isle, Southern Vermont, Newbury, and Mitchell (provisional).

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Yes, it is never too early to think about the 2009 National Championship.  This year marks a change as the Men’s and Women’s Tournament moves to San Antonio, Texas after several years in Greensboro and Orlando.  The San Antonio Sports Foundation led the charge to get the event in town, as San Antonio was named a “Championship City” by the NCAA.  Several other NCAA Championship events will be hosted by the city this year.

Continuing a good idea from last season, the Tournament remains slated for the first weekend in December as opposed to the past practice of scheduling it over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.  In 2008, the schedule change was announced late in the season as a result of the huge travel rush during Thanksgiving.  This busy travel weekend in addition to the cutbacks in schedules by the airlines made it difficult and expensive for the NCAA to get the teams to Greensboro.

Hopefully we’ll see some warmer weather in San Antonio this December.  In 2008, the portable heaters were working overtime to keep everyone warm in the 42 degree chill.  Obviously not the norm in North Carolina in early December.

Oh, and the season kicks off in 6 months and 6 days…

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Yes, it is never too early to think about the 2009 National Championship.  This year marks a change as the Men’s and Women’s Tournament moves to San Antonio, Texas after several years in Greensboro and Orlando.  The San Antonio Sports Foundation led the charge to get the event in town, as San Antonio was named a “Championship City” by the NCAA.  Several other NCAA Championship events will be hosted by the city.

Continuing a good idea from last season, the Tournament remains slated for the first weekend in December as opposed to the past practice of scheduling it over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.  This past season, the schedule change was announced late in the season as a result of the huge travel rush during Thanksgiving.  This busy travel weekend and the cutbacks in schedules by the airlines made it difficult and expensive for the NCAA to get the teams to Greensboro.

Hopefully we’ll see some warmer weather in San Antonio this December.  In 2008, the portable heaters were working overtime to keep everyone warm in the 42 degree chill.  Obviously not the norm in North Carolina in early December.

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