Our counter reached 20 million this afternoon, a sort of culmination to a season where our traffic got a bit of a bounce, for once.

No matter what we do, traffic doesn’t seem to move upward for the season until mid-January. When conference play heats up, so does the site. It’s hard to avoid concluding that D3football.com has taken over as the flagship site in our little network here, and not only that, it’s been that way for three or four years.

But 2007-08 went pretty well. It’s hard to judge raw numbers from year to year because the structure of the site keeps changing — some pages got moved offsite last year, others a couple years earlier, etc. And when looking at the milestones, not every day is created equal. It takes about 10 days of May to equal one day in mid-February. So while it took fewer days to go from 16 to 17 million than it did to go from 19 to 20 million, I’ll trade in the 10 days of February 2007 for the five days of April and May.

Thanks to all who read, as always! Spread the word.

Dates for all of the million milestones. We’ve taken them off the front — too many to list. Our front page is very cluttered as it is.

1 million: Jan. 20, 2000
2 million: Dec. 19, 2000
3 million: May 3, 2001
4 million: Feb. 7, 2002
5 million: Nov. 19, 2002
6 million: Feb. 19, 2003
7 million: Oct. 25, 2003
8 million: Feb. 11, 2004
9 million: June 18, 2004
10 million: Jan. 14, 2005
11 million: March 5, 2005
12 million: Nov. 16, 2005
13 million: Feb. 6, 2006
14 million: March 22, 2006
15 million: Dec. 2, 2006
16 million: Feb. 15, 2007
17 million: May 4, 2007
18 million: Dec. 10, 2007
19 million: Feb. 25, 2008
20 million: April 29, 2008

It’s often difficult when a school goes co-ed, and many Division III women’s schools have begun to admit men in recent years. Immaculata, Regis, Lesley, Chestnut Hill (since moved to D-II), Hood and Wheelock are among them. The Atlantic Woman’s Collegiate Conference was a casualty.

Wells College is adding men’s basketball soon as well.

Randolph-Macon Woman’s College became Randolph College after admitting men, and the transition wasn’t easy — not for the teams and certainly not for the campus.

“We applied to a women’s college, and we’re not graduating from one,” said Hillary Peabody, the student government president. “(Men) are the reality of what we don’t want to happen at our school.”

Read the full story, from the jealousy over full stands at a men’s soccer game to a group of hooded figures stalking freshmen in the school’s first co-ed class to a wake-up call in a Roanoke Times feature story by Erinn Hutkin.