Monthly Archives: April 2009

D-III identity: How are we different?

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The more I become tuned to the D-III identity issue, the more I see things that jump out at me.

This comes from a recent Q&A with a university president, in the NCAA’s Champion magazine:

What attracted you to Division II?
O’Brien: The critical issue is balance. When I was an undergrad at Auburn, there was less commercialization in athletics. I was in classes with the athletes and in a fraternity with them; I think that’s what Division II is all about now. Student-athletes first and foremost are students, as they were in the 1960s. So even though I was in Division I as a student and as an administrator for many years, I’ve always identified with that aspect of intercollegiate athletics in a higher education institution. It wasn’t a foreign concept to me.

What’s so special about Division II?
O’Brien: The student-athletes themselves. Interacting with them, you know they are here primarily for an education, but they also are following their passion. They get to compete in intercollegiate volleyball and soccer and basketball and golf, but they also are getting their education.

Pat O’Brien (no, not that one) is the president of West Texas A&M. What he described about Division II may well be special, but it’s hardly unique. This is what Division III is all about. Division II student-athletes are certainly there to get their education, but they’re being compensated for playing sports. They may be following their passion, but with many of them on scholarship, it’s not the same.

This is why it’s hard to define Division III’s identity without referencing other divisions. Here’s at least one of them, a member of Division II’s Presidents Council if I interpret the article’s vague reference correctly, defining Division II the same way we would define Division III.

Division III needs to stand up for its own identity and not let Division II co-opt it.

NCAA on D-III identity movement

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On a pretty busy day (day job, Randolph-Macon hiring, Sean Wallis announces he’s returning) a tweet caught my eye:

Published a new blog post: Mondays with Myles and Friends: DIII Identity

This from the NCAA’s official blog, the Double-A Zone. So I was hoping this would be some serious discussion of the issues facing Division III and its struggles to gain attention in a noisy collegiate athletics landscape.

In five minutes of interview, admittedly, that would be tough to do.

Unfortunately, even in the NCAA’s attempt to promote this concept, it drops the ball. It’s hard to take a program seriously when it mispronounces the name of the guest right out of the gate. And maybe I’m nitpicking, but the NCAA’s Twitter message promoting the interview had a broken link — at least, it didn’t fit in Twitter’s 140-character limit.

But it’s hard to expect more when the national office has so many people who don’t care about Division III.

Anyway, here’s the interview with NCAA vice president for Division III Dan Dutcher. (That’s in case the embed below doesn’t work for you.)

RIP, Patrick Abegg

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Patrick Abegg was a Division III guy, through and through. From his days as a student manager at Wash U to his last basketball season, when he was our featured bracketologist, the Division III equivalent of Joe Lunardi, Patrick loved Division III.

Patrick Abegg and familyThat’s why it’s so disappointing to have to tell you that Patrick died this past week of a staph infection. He was just 44.

I don’t know more details than that. Patrick’s brother sings in our church choir and he was not there this morning. When our director told us why he was absent, my heart sank.

I know Patrick left a lasting impression at Wash U. Mark Edwards, the men’s basketball coach, has talked more than once about Patrick as his student manager in the 1980s. Patrick was in Salem last year when the Bears brought home their first Division III men’s basketball national title.

But his lasting legacy to Division III basketball fans was his data, and his analysis over the past decade. Years before D3hoops.com was doing the same, Patrick was collecting schedules and results for every Division III basketball team, and calculating his own ranking out of this. Over the past year or so, it became clear his projections were pretty darn good, and worthy of whatever credence and prominence we could give them. His 2002-03 data got us started with publishing schedules and results for all team, a jump-start without which we might not have gotten started for several more years.

I still have his 2001-02 data on my hard drive, and one of my long list of items for this summer was to incorporate that into the site, then try to get more data from him for previous years.

Here’s some of the last data he analyzed for Division III fans:

Final regular-season Pool C rankings for men
Final regular-season Pool C rankings for women

And here’s an interesting post, in which Patrick discusses the effect one game can have on a team’s playoff chances.

We’ll miss you, Patrick, and Division III will miss you.

Division III’s identity project

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Division II just went through this big identity crisis and identification process over the past several years. They ended up with an “I Chose Division II” slogan, which didn’t convey to me what Division II is all about or anything. But then again, I’m not a D-II devotee.

Now, honestly, I think the Division III community knows what Division III is all about, and though I know some differ over whether some schools should be Division III members, I don’t share their opinions. To me, any school willing to sponsor a broad-based athletics program without athletic scholarships is welcome in Division III, whether they have 422 full-time undergraduates (Southern Vermont) or 19,914 (NYU).

But the general public, or even the general sports fan, doesn’t necessarily understand this. And Division III schools have started the process of defining that identity and communicating it in the same way Division II has. To that end, the NCAA is beginning the process of collecting ideas about said identity and distilling it down.

I was honored to be considered worthy of comment on this issue by the NCAA, and spent about an hour on the phone with a consultant a couple days after the D-III Final Four.

Here’s what I told the consultant who called:

We talked briefly about the history of the site (he was surprised to find I was not an NCAA employee), the Division IV movement, how D-III is the highest form of purely amateur sports (my words), “the love of the game,” and the so-called national championship tournament.

He also asked about common misconceptions people have of Division III, and I certainly had a boatload of them for him, since I hear them from all sides. Briefly:

  • Division III is glorified intramurals, no better than high school ball. This couldn’t be further from the truth, of course, and anyone who has played Division III knows that. But that’s the mantra of some people, often coaches who measure themselves by the number of athletic scholarships their players go on to get. I’ve been collecting stories and quotes from people who get to Division III schools and are surprised by the level of competition. Just in case more debunking is needed.
  • Division III is for small liberal arts colleges. There are certainly a lot of small liberal arts colleges in Division III, but that doesn’t mean that public schools, large research institutions and everything else in between can be Division III members. And, to the WIAC haters, I’m sorry, but they have just as much right to be here as you do.
  • Division III is a community. More so than other levels, Division III fans have a camaraderie with each other off the floor or away from the stadium that I don’t see at other levels. There’s a sense of “we’re all in this together” among die-hard Division III fans, where fans of opposing teams will tailgate together before games. I suspect that most interaction between fans of D-I schools in a parking lot are not so friendly.
  • Division III has a national championship. Sorry, not in men’s basketball, it doesn’t. It has a handful of regional championships that all send representatives to the Final Four. For as much time as we spent explaining to people why the NCAA’s bracket is set up this way on Matchup Monday, we spent even more time later in the tournament explaining to people why Wash U faced its toughest opponents the first two weekends.

Now, unfortunately, time ran out on us and while I had made some notes ahead of the call, I didn’t get everything said. Here’s what I didn’t get a chance to get out:

We try to make Division III still feel like it’s big time for the student-athletes, coaches, parents and fans involved. And having just come back from Salem, I know that what we do is noticed. The NCAA does do this as well, don’t get me wrong, but it also doesn’t do this.

The NCAA has certainly worked over the past few years to really enhance the student-athlete experience in terms of the things happening around the competition itself. But it’s time to work on the competition, too. And in basketball especially, that means enhancing the national nature of the NCAA Tournament. Too often money is used as an excuse as to why we can’t do things in Division III, and I get that — I, too, don’t want to see The College of New Jersey or Amherst flying off to St. Louis or St. Paul or Tacoma, Wash., for the first round of the NCAA Tournament, either. But when there’s a choice between sending UW-Whitewater or Wash U. to Elmhurst for the first round or to Centre, both are bus trips and one makes the tournament more national, why in the world aren’t we doing that?

Support for Division III within the NCAA office needs to be better. Why are D-III’s championships handbooks riddled with errors? Why are D3sports.com personnel and Division III fans having to tell the NCAA sports committees who is eligible for its championships? Why aren’t the committee members well-versed enough in the handbook to know that sectionals need All-Tournament teams?

Division II spent a lot of money trying to find its identity. In Division III, the identity is much clearer. If we spend a little money communicating that, great, let’s go for it. That way we won’t have to answer as many questions from parents as to how they can get an athletic scholarship to a Division III school.

But, if we really have money to spend, let’s spend it on making the national championship an actual national championship, not four regional championships that all happen to send their winners to Salem.