Congratulations to the Division III spring sports champions:

Baseball — UW-Whitewater (photo from warhawkfootball.com)
Men’s golf — Guilford
Women’s golf — Methodist
Men’s lacrosse — Salisbury
Women’s lacrosse — New Jersey
Women’s rowing — Ithaca
Softball — St. Thomas
Men’s tennis — UC Santa Cruz
Women’s tennis — Emory
Men’s track — Lincoln
Women’s track — Wartburg

Women’s water polo doesn’t have a Division III championship, but Redlands was selected for the NCAA all-divisions tournament and won one game in the three-game tournament to finish seventh.

And also, a special congratulations to Johns Hopkins, which won the Division I men’s lacrosse championship … even if those players are on scholarship!

It’s hard to avoid noticing the trend. At the beginning of Mount Union’s run, the Purple Raiders were playing Defiance for their non-conference game (the Ohio Athletic Conference has 10 teams, meaning only one opponent must be found each year). Then it was Albion, followed by Allegheny. All regional foes, all within a reasonable distance and with the last two, some reason to expect a competitive result, at least at the time the game was scheduled.

But two years of Allegheny were followed by two years of UW-Whitewater, then Wash U, not an easy trip for either squad. The outcome was hardly in doubt last year and won’t be this year. Next on the list, Averett, a nearly 500-mile trip past Salem to the North Carolina/Virginia border. Mount Union has to go further and further afield to find an opponent. In an era of automatic playoff bids for winning your conference and Pool C bids expanding from three to seven, there’s less and less reason to duck a strong non-conference opponent.

Kudos to Averett for taking the challenge. And shame on anyone closer to Alliance who shared the same open date.

Millsaps couldn’t provide any documentation to verify its claim that Concordia-Selma (or as they list it, Concordia (AL)) had a varsity football program. Well, according to this article from the Selma Times-Journal which a reader sent, they don’t currently, but plan to in 2005. They claim to have ended spring practice with 64 players.

Good thing it’s a home game for Millsaps — with the way Concordia-Selma gets scores out from its other sports, I doubt Millsaps would get accurate stats from this game.