I’ll be honest — I was borderline disgusted when I received my first Gagliardi Trophy publicity package last winter, one promoting Wesley safety Rocky Myers for the award. I was sure this wasn’t within the spirit of the award, wasn’t in keeping with what Division III is all about. And since I’d heard of everyone on the ballot and was familiar with who they played for and against, I voted without looking at the highlight DVD.

But eventually my curiosity got the better of me, and I popped it in the computer and watched it. It was a highlight video, set to the theme from Rocky.

Myers has moved into the real cinema world this month, however, playing New York Giants fullback Larry Csonka in an upcoming movie called Invincible, about Vince Papale, who went from substitute teacher to Eagles special teamer in 1976. The News Journal of Wilmington, Del., talked to Myers and reports.

Retired Pacific Lutheran coach Frosty Westering, who led the Lutes to the 1999 Division III national championship, is one of two former Division III coaches being inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame this weekend. And he’s still having a profound impact on those who are getting to know of him for the first time. Witness this piece on Westering from the South Bend Tribune.

It reminds us that we had first impressions as well, or at least second impressions in Mark Simon’s post-Stagg Bowl feature from six years ago.

Longtime UW-La Crosse coach Roger Harring, who led the Eagles to the 1992 and 1995 Division III national titles, is in this year’s induction class as well.

As you might have observed, over the past year D3football.com (and to a lesser extent, D3hoops.com) has suffered occasional slowdowns, times at which one site or the other would move at a crawl because of high traffic.

We attempted to alleviate that in February by moving D3hoops.com’s message board, Posting Up, onto a separate server within the same host. While that worked, it was only a temporary measure — we have more planned.

Unfortunately, our message board software itself, which we have been using since Posting Up opened in November 1998, is part of the problem. Although we love Discus because it was written by programmers associated with Hope College, we have outgrown it and it can not support a site of our size.

To this end, we’re changing message board software. We’re also combining Post Patterns with Posting Up and we’re putting the combined message board on a separate server. We believe this will make both D3hoops.com and D3football.com run more smoothly all year.

The new board will also have more modern features, the types of things you’re used to if you use forums on other sites. Your username and password will carry over to the new site and we’ll transfer the posts. To this end, we will temporarily shut down new user registration later in the week, and will shut down the entire board sometime on Saturday evening before the transfer. When all is complete we’ll put up the new link.

If you are registered for both Posting Up and Post Patterns, we are attempting to determine that now so we can combine them into one account, with one post total. We’ll attempt to use your password from Post Patterns, since this sport is more active at the moment.