Indiana, it’s about time!

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Folks in Indiana have been well aware; people in neighboring states, not always. But with most of Indiana refusing to observe Daylight Savings Time, it’s been a curse on football schedule-makers.

For those who don’t know, most of Indiana, the part in the Eastern Time Zone, has not observed Daylight Savings Time, the time between the beginning of April and the end of October in which most of the USA turns its clocks forward one hour. Therefore, games scheduled in Indiana from Weeks 1-9 actually start one hour later to those based in Michigan, Ohio, etc.

Most of the Indiana schools get their schedules right year-in and year-out. They know that if a game starts at 1:30 in Ohio, then they need to list it as 12:30 on their schedule if listing it in Indiana time. But it often confuses opposing schedule-makers, who will list a 1:30 Indiana Time game as 1:30, rather than 2:30, and say “All Times Eastern.”

It even causes headaches on our schedule, since the change in time comes during the football season. We have to manually change the clocks between Week 9 and Week 10, when Indiana comes back into line. It also affects people calling the NCAA’s national office, in Indianapolis.

Thankfully, starting in 2006, this will no longer be an issue. The state’s legislature passed a law restoring Daylight Savings Time in Indiana for the first time since the early 1970s.

We can hardly wait.

Recruiting Recap: NCAA’s newest members gathering building blocks

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SUNY-Maritime

Some of Division III’s newest programs — including one that won’t play a varsity game until 2006 and another that isn’t playoff eligible until 2008 — lead the list of destinations announced by recent recruits.

Tavares (FL) High School seniors Ryan Leary and Danny McManus will enroll at SUNY-Maritime (Coach Clayton Kendrick-Holmes standing to right in photo). The Throggs Neck, Long Island-based school announced it will compete as a club team in 2005 and play a varsity schedule in 2006. Tavares teammate Matt Habermehl will attend Millikin University.

North Carolina Wesleyan, which enjoyed a 4-4 inaugural season in 2004, will get a pair of New Bern (NC) High School teammates as Joey Belviy and A.J. Glenn announced plans to suit up for the Battling Bishops this season.

Belviy led New Bern in sacks and tackles for loss last season despite standing just 5’6. “It means a lot to me because I really didn’t think I’d get the chance at first because of my height and size,” he recently told the New Bern Sun Journal.

Bradford (FL) High School’s Milton Sumpter will attend Tri-State University, which is entering the second season of a four-year transitional period in its move from NAIA to NCAA.

“I want to thank God for giving me the ability, I want to thank my parents for letting me play and I want to thank my coaches because they taught me a lot, even off the field,” Sumpter told the Bradford County Telegraph.

While Sumpter will pick up some frequent flyer miles traveling from Florida to Indiana, they won’t compare to those racked up by Joe Quinn when he leaves home in Anchorage, Alaska to attend Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Quinn is a two-sport athlete at West Anchorage High School where he plays goalie on the soccer team. “Goalie is kind of the closest soccer position you can get to football,” Quinn quoted to the Anchorage Daily News in this interesting feature. “It’s kind of a seamless transition.”

Of course, we’re only assuming Quinn will fly to JHU. He might choose to make the 76 hour, 4,316-mile trip by car instead.

Elsewhere:

– Paraclete (CA) HS senior Domenic Donato will enroll at Chapman.

– Stevenson (CA) HS seniors Ashton Clarke and Philip Trapp will play for Claremont-Mudd-Scripps while attending Claremont McKenna College.

– Montour (PA) HS senior Ernie Ricci goes to Dickinson.

– Highlands (OH) HS senior Chris Owens will go to Earlham while teammates Bert Bathiany and Shaun Matisak head to Ohio Northern and Weston Lawrence enrolls at Wittenberg.

– Pinkerton (NH) Academy senior Nate Gooden will attend Plymouth State.

For a list of other recruits and their college destinations, click here.

If you want to share recruiting news, feel free to do so using the comments feature below. But don’t forget that you need to post the link to the newspaper story so we can verify the information.

Otherwise we’ll make you chauffer Joe Quinn from Baltimore to Anchorage over Christmas break.

For More Indoor

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Having already Dosed on the Atlantic Indoor Football League, here’s another place where former Division III players are still playing the game they love.

Reggie Hayes’ most recent column in the Fort Wayne (IN) News Sentinel focused on former Defiance College cornerback Scott Heighland who plays for the city’s team in the United Indoor Football League.

Heighland isn’t the only Division III player on a UIFL roster. Hayes’ column also mentions Coe College alum and 2002 D3football.com All-American Fred Jackson. Jackson leads the league in touchdowns with 31, only 16 in front of the league’s number two.

Players from across the Division III landscape — Coe, Lakeland, Montclair State, Mount Union, Union, Washington & Jefferson, UW-Whitewater to name a few — dot UIFL rosters.

Plus the UIFL answered the eternal question pondered by philosophers and astrophysicists for years — “Where’s the Beef?” (A: Omaha)