Tag Archives: Whittier

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ATN Podcast 404: The aftermath, the return, the revival

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The UW-River Falls postseason media campaign continued through the end of January, all the way through a parade through town and yes, one last interview with the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast about the 2025 season.

Our guests on this podcast: UW-River Falls coach Matt Walker, John Carroll coach Brian Polian, and Whittier coach Cory White. It’s the first episode of our 20th season, here on the longest running Division III football podcast.

Is the next Falcons’ quarterback on campus already, or is there a chance for a transfer for the fall? What did it feel like to lose some key players shortly after the championship into the portal? Which does Walker have more of, beers or championship hats? Those hard-hitting questions and more in this conversation with Matt Walker.

Polian is brand-new to the job, but not new to college football head coaching, as the athletic director at John Carroll and the former head coach at Nevada. First off, we have to get his take on Ty Montgomery, who had a huge week in front of pro scouts at the Senior Bowl at the end of January, and we’ll also hear how Polian plans to juggle both the head coaching and athletic director job, whose idea it was for him to apply in the first place, and what he told people who had interviewed for the role when he told them he was taking the job himself.

Cory White is the new head coach at Whittier. It’s a new day at Whittier, which is returning to the field after three years off. White says he would not have taken the job as the head coach of the Poets if not for assurances from the administration that they would do things better this time around. Hear about how many players the Poets have already (it’s a big number) and where they expect to be in the fall, all with the team going through a strength and conditioning practice in the background on a beautiful January day in Southern California.

That and more in this edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast. The D3football.com Around the Nation podcast is a weekly conversation about NCAA Division III football, and has been running since 2007.

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Photos: D3sports.com; Berry sports information; UW-River Falls athletics

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ATN Podcast 365: Hope is not lost

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This past week, a number of teams had their shot. They had the opponent they wanted to play on the field in front of them. They generally even had that game at home, in front of their home fans.

But in Week 8 of the 2024 Division III football season, it didn’t really break as these teams hoped. Not for Ursinus, not for Coe, not for Case Western Reserve, not for Washington U. Not even for St. Olaf, if you want to dig down that far.

In the past, that would generally be it. A chance at reaching the Division III playoffs was going to be a stretch. But not anymore, not with 12 at-large teams, a 40-team bracket, and an NCAA Power Index rating system that just might save some of these teams.

Who has hope? Patrick and Greg break it down with analysis, rather than overreaction.

Marietta made the Top 25 this week for the first time in program history, and Pioneers coach Andy Waddle sits down with us for Fast Five. This is a program that has come a long way, but still has its two biggest games of the regular season yet to come, and both are on the road.

Plus, Patrick and Greg hand out game balls. Patrick pulls out a highlight clip from 21 years ago, and yes, a number of clips from this past weekend. Plus we go through more highlights from Region 1 through Region 6, we answer a couple of reader questions in the mailbag, and not only does Greg wax poetic in On the Spot, we Axe poetic as well. Plus, it’s our 365th podcast — we now have a podcast for every day of the year. So that’s a thing.

The D3football.com podcast is a weekly in-season podcast by Patrick Coleman and Greg Thomas, which was started in 2007. New episodes are published weekly during the season.

Hit play, or subscribe to get this podcast on your mobile device.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

You can subscribe to the Around the Nation Podcast in Apple Podcasts, and many other places. You 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

Here’s how to find us on some of the major podcasting apps:

Theme music: Power 2 by DJmentos.
Jason Kapusta, Westminster (Pa.) athletics; Wheaton athletics photo by Michael Hudson photography; Marietta athletics photo by Rebecca Wheeler Photography

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ATN Podcast 328: Three teams with reason to look ahead

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The Division III basketball season is wrapping up and Pat Coleman is diving back into D3football and podcast production, but that doesn’t mean basketball is far from his mind. As it turns out, when you combine the two Division III basketball Final Fours, eight teams, across seven schools, only three of them sponsor football, and that’s exactly the right number of interviews it takes to make one of our offseason podcasts.

So this month we welcome Jace Rindahl of UW-Whitewater, the new 36-year-old head coach who was playing linebacker for the Warhawks so recently that he was the 2008 D3football.com Defensive Player of the Year. The Warhawks men’s basketball team made a surprising run to the D-III Final Four. We also welcome John Carroll coach Jeff Behrman. (Mount Union’s men’s basketball team made it to the Final Four, but coach Geoff Dartt again declined an interview request, so we’ll represent the OAC with its next-best men’s basketball team.) And Paul Crowley of Christopher Newport joins us as well after the CNU men won the D-III national title and the CNU women won their national semifinal and will play for the national title on Saturday, April 1.

Rindahl has spent 16 of the past 18 years in the Whitewater football program, and he comes into his first year as head coach with a schedule that is just simply loaded, starting with John Carroll. He talks with us about what kind of head coach he’ll be, how the program feels after their surprising first-round playoff loss to Aurora, and how they intend to handle each new opponent in that gauntlet. Behrman is a John Carroll grad just returning to the institution after a quarter-century, and he talks about what the university has to sell to recruits, how much he’ll change the scheme, whether he’ll be able to bring some stability to a program that is on its third head coach in three seasons, and how much Mount Union footage he has watched so far. And Crowley talks about the great gameday atmosphere at his institution, some of last year’s early growing pains in his first year as a head coach and what kind of kids he is looking to recruit to get his program back in the conference title conversation.

Plus, Pat and Greg talk about the fact that D-III seems to keep losing programs and what that means for the SCIAC (divisions?) and the SAA (expansion?). Pat puts Greg on the spot and gets a conference ranking for the SCAC, whenever it is able to get all of its programs on the field.

For the record, from the remaining Final Four teams: Swarthmore hasn’t had a football program or coach since 2000, Rhode Island College and Transylvania do not sponsor football and Smith College does not enroll men.

Also of note: There is a bonus podcast for our Patreon subscribers with more content from each of these coaches at patreon.com/d3sports.

Hit play, or subscribe to get this podcast on your mobile device.

Full episode:

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Links mentioned in this podcast:

You can subscribe to the Around the Nation Podcast in Apple Podcasts, and many other places. You 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

Here’s how to find us on some of the major podcasting apps:

Theme music: Power 2 by DJmentos.
Photos by Doug Sasse, d3photography.com; Vance Solseth, Christopher Newport athletics; Ben Peskar, John Carroll athletics