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