Author Archives: Pat Coleman

Going camping

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Over the next week, thousands of Division III football players will be reporting for camp. There’s no one single reporting date for training camp in Division III football: it’s based on a formula that takes into account not only the date of the first game (Sept. 6, even for those who start on Thursday, Sept. 4) and the first day of classes.

So if your favorite team starts tomorrow and your opening week opponent starts two days later, you’re not supposed to have a leg up. Each school is supposed to have 21 practice opportunities, accounting for two-a-days when permitted before class starts.

As teams report, our reporters are doing their rounds of telephone calls to coaches in order to get the latest information for Kickoff. But I’m thinking about the freshmen coming into their first collegiate camp.

Certainly many of the hundreds of freshmen who will be putting on pads in the next week or so have some idea of what they are getting into, some knowledge that Division III football is like nothing they’ve ever experienced. Others may have been deluded into thinking that Division III is glorified intramurals, that it’s not serious football, that they can dominate just because they were good in high school.

News flash: Everyone here was good in high school. Pretty much everyone started (unless you were Terrelle Pryor’s backup), most were all-conference, many were all-city/region/district and some were all-state. And some have three years on you. So come in with high expectations, but stay grounded … or someone will ground you the moment you put on pads.

We don’t often get the freshman perspective, but there is an incoming player for Colorado College who is already blogging about “The D3 experience.” Recommend checking out Chris Jarmon’s blog to see what he has to say when he reports for camp on Friday.

Opening weekend, who’s with me?

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I keep going back and forth as to whether I can manage it but I’m tempted to try this Week 1 tripleheader, taking advantage of my new Minneapolis home base.

Friday night, it would be NAIA quarterfinalist St. Xavier at defending Division III champion UW-Whitewater, a 7 p.m. CT start. Then Saturday morning (yes, morning), East Texas Baptist is at St. John’s, 11 a.m. CT kickoff and Saturday night, Hardin-Simmons vs. UW-La Crosse (at Winona State in Minnesota, shaving some travel time) at 7 p.m. CT.

Doable? Sure. Sane? Not without a second driver. So we’ll see.

Of course, with a lot of drive time (or money) you could make it a quadrupleheader and pick up Thursday night games between Springfield and Fitchburg State or Mass Maritime and SUNY-Maritime. East Coasters could take the former, add Nichols at Westfield State or Curry at Worcester State on Friday night, Rowan at Bridgewater State at noon on Saturday and one of a handful of games that night, say, WPI at Mass-Dartmouth and never leave the state of Massachusetts.

If I were still working at NBCSports.com and living in Connecticut, I guess that would be my itinerary.

What we’re reading

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We at D3football.com know we are not the only ones writing interesting stories about Division III football, and even if we had a full-time staff of writers we couldn’t corner the market on everything interesting.

I and Keith McMillan and Gordon Mann especially come across many stories we could never hope to write or do justice, since we all have “real” jobs and such. But we haven’t had an easy way to bring all of those stories to you. Aside from the occasional blog post about a story, which takes more time than we usually have to devote, most just get filed away in the cobwebs of our brains.

However, we’re about to change all that, thanks to a new Web site for journalists called Publish2. One of the features of the site is a tool I’m using to create a feed of stories that I’ve tagged as being of interest. You can always find it on the right-hand rail here in the Daily Dose, and we’ll work on getting it incorporated into our already cluttered front page as well.

The feed is labeled “What we’re reading” and contains stories we’ve tagged that are of interest to us, along with a quick summary of why they might be of interest to you. Currently that box contains stories about what a couple of prominent D-III players are doing after graduation, a feature on incoming College Football Hall of Famer Jim Ballard, a trend story and a player profile. You can see what else is in there beyond the five most recent by clicking on the link at the bottom of the box.

Enjoy!