ATN Podcast: Comparing conferences

Posted on by

Greg Ford diving touchdown catchThree weeks into the season a fair amount of the non-conference schedule is in the books, games that provide the basis for much of what we do in terms of ranking conferences twice a season. This week Keith and Pat discuss not only the big games from the past weekend but also take a snapshot of which conferences exceeded expectations and which underperformed.

Click the play button below to listen.

[display_podcast]

You can load the podcast page in iTunes or can also get this and any of our future Around the Nation podcasts automatically by subscribing to this RSS feed: http://www.d3blogs.com/d3football/?feed=podcast

Game Day: It takes courage

Posted on by

We’ve got three Top 25 battles during the day and an intriguing rivalry game at night here as Week 3 of the 2010 Division III football season dawns.

Tonight will be particularly interesting in that we’ll get our first real look at what St. John Fisher is made of. The Cardinals have blown out their first two opponents, teams that finished in the lower half of the NJAC last season. Tonight they play Rochester, which, while not having made the playoffs, has still provided a challenge to its local rival. Here’s Keith McMillan’s take on last year’s Courage Bowl between the two.

The Wheaton/UW-Platteville game also looks interesting under the lights tonight, as do many of our afternoon games, such as Trine at UW-River Falls, St. John’s hosting Concordia-Moorhead and Pomona-Pitzer/Lewis and Clark, which I covered last year and was an entertaining game,

And, of course, there are three games between ranked teams, with Wesley hosting Delaware Valley, Mississippi College at Hardin-Simmons and Ohio Northern at Otterbein.

Where are you and what are you seeing today?

Welcome to our new home!

Posted on by

New lookI’m about to let you in on a little secret. We here at D3sports.com have never been designers.

Our sites have never had the most modern look and they’ve never been the most well-organized, to say the least. Our layout was cluttered from the moment D3football.com launched in July 1999.

We’ve known that for some time, and for about three years now, a grand redesign had been talked about, sketched, but never quite achieved as we tried to get the entire D3sports.com network on the same page, so that we could then turn that page together. Rather than continue to fight this battle with a staff of exactly zero full-time employees, we decided to hire out.

And that’s where PrestoSports came in. They’re already the trusted home of athletics web sites at all levels, from Butler and Kent State down to high schools, with hundreds of Division III clients and more joining the network every year. (We see you there, Centennial Conference, Simpson, Swarthmore, Wooster.) We’ve already run our game day data through them for years and now their site design is on par with the rest of the Division III market.

We wanted in. And here we are, with the first of five site rollouts to come over the next few months. D3soccer.com, D3hoops.com and D3baseball.com will also get a similar makeover. D3sports.com will turn from being a placeholder site with one story and a bunch of links into a place where can also give some coverage to sports such as lacrosse, track, softball, cross country and other sports not dominated by UW-Whitewater or Mount Union.

I hope you will find everything you expect on our new site. Some of the archives are not yet brought over, but that process will continue. When I met with Presto this spring to discuss design, I told them the only thing we needed to keep was the logo, that which you see at the top of this page. From a look and feel perspective, nothing else was sacred.

And this is what we have, finally, a modern news site worthy of the fine student-athletes and great sport that we cover.

If you have questions, please drop us an email at info@d3sports.com or use our feedback form. Or since this is our blog, you can comment here at the bottom of the page.