The daily dish on Division III basketball
Finally, someone has delved a little deeper into a story I’ve often wondered about — how two 7-footers from Montana ended up playing basketball at UW-Stout.
John and Jacob Nonemacher, from Kalispell, Mont., are entering their junior seasons at the WIAC school, and all because Stout head coach Eddie Andrist (who is erroneously referred to as Eddie Frist in the story) returned his e-mail.
It’s a tall tale and an interesting one, from The Daily Inter Lake.
The (Staunton, Va.) News Leader reports that two transfers have landed in the Bridgewater (Va.) Eagles men’s basketball program.
Josh Fox will come to Bridgewater from Division I Radford University. He was selected to the Big South’s All-Freshman team this past season.
The Eagles will also pick up a transfer from ODAC rival Virginia Wesleyan as Ryan Glover will change college addresses.
From the “All Things Bridgewater” Department, please see the D3football.com’s Daily Dose.
I just found out that Johns Hopkins has started publishing an athletics blog, and from there discovered links to McDaniel and Centennial Conference blogs as well. As relative veterans of blogging ourselves (I refuse to use the media-created term blogosphere), D3hoops.com and D3football.com would like to welcome them aboard. We’ll add them to the links on both Daily Dose blogs when we get the chance.
It’s hard to get too much further north in Division III than Duluth, Minn., although Pacific Lutheran and Puget Sound are a few miles further north in Washington. While on a family vacation here I took the opportunity to stop in at St. Scholastica.
The school is a member of both the NAIA and NCAA which is declaring for the NCAA playoffs this season for the first time in a while. So, predictably, there were questions about how the NCAA did some things, etc.
I think St. Scholastica has the makings of a schedule that can get it into the tournament in men’s basketball. They’ve gone out of their way to schedule West Region games, inviting only in-region teams to their tipoff tournament and getting into another tournament that has solely West Region opponents. They play UW-Stout, UW-Superior and UW-Eau Claire and Hamline in terms of “nearby” non-conference opponents and should end up with 12 or 13 regional games. That could get them in in a 60- to 61-team tournament.
At least we can be relatively sure the committee won’t look past a first-time competitor. The men’s committee put dual member St. Joseph’s (Maine) into the field in its first year declaring for the NCAA postseason.
Occasionally I make campus visits when I’m out of town in places where we don’t have as many contributors. (Last summer I stopped by Keene State.) As I do, I’ll write about them here.
It looks like this is how the NCAA and the women’s basketball committee are planning to handle the expanded NCAA Tournament for 2005-06.
First of all, an NCAA News article refers to a field of 63, which is one team more than the maximum we’d been hearing over the past two years. The expansion, which takes effect this fall for all Division III team tournament sports, means there will be one spot for every 6.5 schools that sponsor the sport, rather than one for every 7.5. (If there are 63 women’s NCAA Tournament bids, one should expect around 60 men’s slots. There are more women’s schools than men’s schools.)
In addition, with a Wednesday opening round, there has been concern over missed class time. The women’s basketball committee proposed and the championships committee accepted the following setup (follow carefully):
There are 63 teams. Therefore, one team gets a first-round bye and does not play an opening-round game. That team will face the winner of the one Wednesday first-round game on Saturday night. All other first-round games will be played Friday night, with the winners meeting on Saturday.
Although the NCAA News does not specify, one would expect this means a return to the four-team regionals at one site, with home-court advantage thrown out the window for half of the field. The winners of those first/second-round regionals would advance to the sectionals, which would be set up similarly to previous years.
This is not a done deal. There is still another committee that must approve this before it goes into practice. It has the advantage of cutting down a day of missed class time, since teams could currently miss Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday classes if they travel for a first-round game and win to advance to the second round.
However, the unspoken caveat here is cost. Now the NCAA must pay to house three-quarters of the teams playing that first weekend instead of one-half. With four teams at one site, three must travel. It will increase travel costs and could lower gate revenue (which, granted, is small to begin with).
The championships committee also recommended the men’s basketball committee adopt this format. I, for one, hope it does not. Some of the most exciting games of the early part of the tournament are between schools evenly matched in front of a large crowd. Now, what are the chances that a 6, 7 or 8 seed would host one of these four-team regionals for the first and second round? The NCAA would be making the event less fan-friendly and more expensive to run.