… D3football.com opened. I’m sure I’ve told this story before but I can’t find it, so I’m repeating it, here on 7-7-07.

This was kind of a risk for us to take in 1999. We — the Division III Basketball Online inner circle of myself, Ray Martel and Jim Stout — had a very successful and well-received men’s and women’s basketball site. But there was a Division III Football Online out there already, and we were kinda pushing into their territory. We’d tried to acquire that site, like we’d acquired the basketball site two years earlier, but it wasn’t for sale.

So we started our own, trying to collect football info as much under the radar as possible, though people eventually put two and two together. And on July 7, a Wednesday, we opened the virtual doors on both this site and the renamed D3hoops.com.

And 21.7 million front page views later, here we are. Since then, we’ve been working in two separate worlds, in a sense, and three with the opening of D3baseball.com this winter. But we’re working on that, in making all three sites more unified, in a way that will open the doors of the D3sports.com family to even more coverage and sharing of resources.

Our 2007 preseason coverage will begin in a matter of days. If you’ve taken the long offseason off, welcome back!

St. Peter’s dropped football a few weeks ago, leaving three Division III football teams scrambling for games.

While it hasn’t worked out well for St. Peter’s, obviously, the D-III schools have made it work, finally. And in the end, it helped out another school that needed games.

St. Peter’s was scheduled to play Western Connecticut, Salisbury and Geneva. Just this week, we learned Western Connecticut filled its open date with a Week 1 game against Wagner. Salisbury and Geneva ended up scheduling each other.

But the St. Peter’s fallout helped another school. At the beginning of June, Frostburg State released a schedule that had it playing Waynesburg on Nov. 3. Only problem, Waynesburg was playing a conference game that day. (Perhaps Frostburg didn’t read all of its correspondence.) Losing the Waynesburg game leaves Frostburg with just eight games.

We tried matching Frostburg State up with Western Connecticut on their mutual Week 1 open date, though admittedly, that’s not a short trip. We recommended the matchup to the respective coaches. But we were also able to find some of St. Peter’s other games, and found they were scheduled to play at Duquesne on Sept. 29 — for Duquesne’s homecoming.

Duquesne is in Pittsburgh. Desperate for a game. I-AA nonscholarship. Great match for Frostburg. We make the recommendation. And according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, they took each other up on it.

Before we had an Open Dates board, we tried to play matchmaker a lot more often. Although the coaches do it themselves on our site now, it’s still satisfying to help out.

Ricky Lannetti would have turned 25 this weekend.

If you don’t recall the name, a reminder — Lannetti was a wide receiver for Lycoming before he passed away on Dec. 6, 2003. He lost his battle with a staph infection that night, the day Lycoming was scheduled to play Bridgewater in the national quarterfinals.

I came across a tribute site built to him this evening. If you’ve been around this site for four years, you may remember our coverage of his death. We were in Williamsport that weekend and had unprecedented access behind the scenes on a day in which the game was snowed out.

People still sign Lannetti’s guestbook. They get together every year on his birthday. There’s an annual 3-on-3 basketball tournament in his memory each summer. They raise awareness of MRSA — methicillin resistant staphyloccus aureus, the superbug that killed Lannetti.

His parents, Theresa and Rick, spread the word about MRSA to this day.

“His name is now living through MRSA awareness campaigns throughout the country,” Rick Lannetti told the Times News, a newspaper in Carbon County, Pa. “His picture and other helpful information is posted at colleges and high schools everywhere, and I still get emails thanking him all the time for making them aware of this superbug. His name and his story are being heard around the world. His passing tells about the superbug and that it could kill even the healthiest people. He’s pretty much actively saving lives, or at least bringing about an awareness that this deadly germ exists. To have a family street named after him, that would be really something special. His friends and college teammates, they visit me now and then, and I know how proud they would be for a long-term tribute to him.”

Hope this helps.