In a sports world plagued by stories of athletes using performance enhancing drugs, it’s natural to wonder whether this is a problem for Division III athletics, too. Rich Scarcella of the Reading (Pa.) Eagle looks at how Albright College is addressing this concern.

While the NCAA tests Division I and II football and baseball players for steroids and has year round tests to determine what other scholarship sports have a higher risk of steroid use, that level of testing hasn’t extended to Division III. There is random testing at NCAA playoff events and a pilot program from the NCAA to address the problem outside of the postseason.

The cost of testing and a conventional belief that non-scholarship athletes have less incentive to use performance enhancing drugs are two reasons given for less testing at this level. But 2006 events at UW-Stout and a 2005 NCAA survey in which Division III athletes reported the highest levels of amphetamine use (see page 12) have called that conventional wisdom into question.

As noted in the Reading Eagle article, the NCAA has a pilot program that tests athletes year-round for performance enhancing and recreational drugs, including marijuana. Alcohol is only tested for certain sports, like rifle shooting. Because it’s essentially a fact-finding study, there are no sanctions for testing positive.

But Albright has gone considerably farther. There are sanctions for testing positive with a “three strikes and you’re out” policy. A missed or refused test is considering a positive result. And alcohol is a tested substance. The Albright athletes interviewed had a divided opinion on the testing.

Sophomore running back Nate Romig says, “At the Division III level a college can’t give money to someone to play football…At Division I and II, colleges are paying you to play by giving out scholarships. They can do what they want to do to those athletes. They can test. I’m paying my way here. I do feel that my privacy is being invaded to a point. It is an infringement. I have teammates who feel the same way.” Despite the reservations, Romig also feels the testing should be adopted at other schools.

Athletic Director Steve George points out that the divided opinion isn’t confined to the athletes. “I’m not sure we had the support from the other side of the street (administration). On a college campus, there’s a liberal point of view that students should be allowed to experiment and to be able to find their way. When I came over to the athletic department, we had some issues.”

Personally I like randomly testing athletes for performance enhancing drugs throughout the year. If you’re trying to police this kind of drug use, you should cover off season workouts. And I like testing for recreational drugs during the sports season.

I’m less clear on testing for recreational drugs in the off season. Though morally opposed to the use of illegal drugs, does a basketball player or football player represent a college any more than any other student? If you’re going to test the athletes, why not other groups, too?

I’m no NFL expert and I steadfastly do not claim to be. All I know is that it seems from sheer numbers that Division III has had a banner draft and free agent season.

Rob Rodriguez, the Christopher Newport defensive back who was a senior in 2006, got his name added to the list and will be in the Kansas City Chiefs’ minicamp this weekend. That means nearly a dozen new D-III players will be in camps along with the two draftees. And we had two draftees for the second year in a row.

The D-III/NFL connection was looking a little light in recent years, after Ethan Brooks, R.J. Bowers, R-Kal Truluck and Bill Schroeder left the game. But Fred Jackson was a nice addition to the NFL contingent last season and Rodriguez is another alumnus who has stuck with the game. Former UW-Whitewater tight end Pete Schmitt is working out with the Washington Redskins during their offseason period and is in their minicamp this weekend after entering training camp with the team last year. John Carroll’s London Fletcher continues to carry the flag for Division III players in the league and Trinity (Texas) grad Jerheme Urban got some notice as an Arizona Cardinal last season.

Won’t argue with it and won’t try to explain it. Just hope Division III fans can enjoy the ride.

Whoa … so it’s been a while since we wrote a blog post on football, I know, but wanted to let people know we haven’t given up on it.

There’s been a bunch of little initiatives in the works here and I wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to.

We’ve been building out the D3sports.com Network a little bit at a time. A year ago, Jim Dixon brought his existing baseball site into the network and D3baseball.com was born. This year we’re going to have a similar situation as Jim Matson (known as Hiker Jim on our message boards) is bringing his love of soccer to the network and will be running D3soccer.com. (Contact me if you are interested in joining the D3soccer news team, by the way.)

We’ve added a jobs site, replacing the job boards that we had before. Our goal is to eventually have listings for all sports, as well as administrative jobs such as AD and SID positions. If you have a job to post, click here. We won’t be listing just Division III jobs, but any job that a D-III coach or player could reasonably aspire too, so we welcome high school jobs and college jobs from other divisions.

And we’ve made some interim upgrades to D3sports.com, which encompasses the top news stories from all of our sites. We’ve also added RSS feeds for all of our sites, which you can access from D3sports.com. That will deliver the latest Division III stories straight to your RSS reader. Here’s the link to the D3football.com RSS feed. In order to make room for this D3sports move, we moved the message boards to their own domain: D3boards.com.

Plus, we’ve been slowly but surely putting the football schedules into the system and we’re about two-thirds of the way there.

So while we haven’t been blogging, we’ve still been working. Sorry for the silence.