Now we are six

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Today is the sixth birthday of D3football.com, a site we launched with some trepidation on July 7, 1999.
Old D3football.com logo
I had been running Division III Basketball Online, as it was then called, for about a year and a half when I and the others involved in the site at the time, primarily Jim Stout and Ray Martel, decided to do a football site.

I had acquired Division III Basketball Online from the Centennial Conference and commissioner Steve Ulrich for free shortly after the beginning of the 1997-98 season after it had been only rarely updated the final months of the season before and we had started to make headway with it. Early in the 1999 offseason, I approached Ulrich to see if we could purchase Division III Football Online from him, offering to run his ads on the front page instead of ours for the first full season as payment, but he wasn’t interested. (Turns out this would have probably netted about $1,200.) I didn’t really want much of the content on Division III Football Online — I wanted the name, to match our other site, and I wanted the established links to that site to follow to ours.

So we forged ahead with building our own site, but we were worried there would be backlash. Our basketball site was very popular, but here we were encroaching on someone else’s already-established territory. Even though we were about to take Division III football coverage to a new level, we were concerned.

Our plans were grandiose for the time — a page of schedule and results for each of the more than 220 Division III football teams, extensive scoreboard updates on game day, printing every game story that we received, publishing columns from every part of the country. And it was difficult to do because we were trying to keep things quiet — it’s hard enough now to collect all of the Division III football schedules, but think back to the Web sites of six years ago and what was available when.

Also, we couldn’t use the Division III Football Online name, so we decided to name the new site for its URL, D3football.com. And we changed the name of the basketball site to D3hoops.com. Division III Football Online closed up shop after a couple of years, and Ulrich sold his last remaining site, College Lacrosse USA, for what I understand is an obnoxious sum of money before the tech bubble burst. (Kudos.)

Thanks for allowing me to reminisce and for us to have such fun covering Division III football and basketball. It would be nothing without the 25 million front-page visitors we’ve had over that time.

5 thoughts on “Now we are six”

  1. Happy birthday, Pat! As “Papa” of the “Twins”, we fans owe you an incredible debt of gratitude.

    My story is similar to that of many others. Before you and the miracle of the Internet, my fan support for my alma mater, McMurry in Abilene TX, was feasibly impossible. Yes, the Abilene Reporter-News does an excellent job of reporting McMurry, Hardin-Simmons and D2 Abilene Christian. All 3 schools have radio broadcasts of the games. (McMurry even broadcasts an aggressive schedule of all football games, about 40 men’s and women’s hoops and at least a dozen baseball games each year.) Without the internet, it was impossible to access those games 180 miles away here in Dallas.

    You have done your sites with class and dignity. They have become a clearinghouse of information and and a thinktank of discussion for the serious fan. The synergy of D3Football and the SIDs in the reccently announced All-Region teams is another fruit borne by these sites. The professionalism is readily apparent. IMHO, D3 athletics have been transformed by your dream, and we D3 fans have been the prime beneficiary.

    We shout a hearty HAPPY BIRTHDAY! And thanks a (25) million!

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