Today is the sixth birthday of D3football.com, a site we launched with some trepidation on July 7, 1999.

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.

We’ve celebrated the AIFL in this space before. (Well, OK, we haven’t celebrated it as much as listed the D-III alumni in the league.) But these players, the Canton (Ohio) Legends team specifically, are getting a crash course in life in the low minor leagues.

Early in the season, offensive coordinator Jim Ballard, an All-America quarterback at Mount Union and 1993 winner of the Gagliardi Trophy, resigned along with other coaches because they weren’t getting paid. (And of course, the owner told the local paper that he fired them.)

Now, the team might not play its upcoming playoff game because the checks from a game two weeks ago have not arrived. Randell Knapp, an All-America wide receiver at Mount Union in 2003, told the Canton Repository (registration required) that they hadn’t gotten a paycheck they were expecting eight days earlier and they did not practice Tuesday. He, along with Baldwin-Wallace standout quarterback Dan Larlham and Malone wide receiver Eric Rector, said they would not play Saturday without a check.

“It’s not about the money,” Knapp told the paper. “Most of these guys would pay to play. I talked with Danny and we both agreed we’d pay to play flag football. But the fact is, we made a deal to be paid $300 a game, and checks are bouncing, and checks are late. We have to draw a line at some point.”

Lines in the sand are legendary — sounds like the Legends have drawn one here.

I’m heading up to Philadelphia shortly to address the Division III Sports Information Directors at the CoSIDA convention. I have to make one final checkoff on this on Monday morning but I expect to have a rather important announcement to make at that time. (To the general reader, we’ll post it on the site Monday afternoon or evening, time permitting.)

To the SIDs reading this — see you there!