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.
I got a comment via email that I am going to anonymize and share, then share my response:
I appreciate what you say about the tournament experience, but the funding for that still comes from the NCAA and the membership, and that is something the NCAA does seem to have some genuine interest in. I also draw that from talking with members of the overall championships committee (not just basketball, but the overall Division III committee), who really do want to make sure the kids come away with a big-time feel.
Obviously, I can’t speak to anything other than basketball and football from personal experience, and other sports certainly can have different levels of attention paid to them.
And I COMPLETELY agree about the staff’s attention to Division III. There’s no reason we should have better data (regional records, OWP and OOWP) for championships purposes but we seem to, year after year, in basketball.
There are definitely a couple of different definitions of “the NCAA” — one is the staff at the national office, who, yes, don’t pay much attention to Division III. The carelessness shows.
However, the member schools vote on and make the rules. So it’s not like some penny-pincher in Indianapolis is creating the rules; they’re enforcing what Division III schools have said they want.
Whether this past year’s tournament is what those schools had in mind when they voted in this radical new national playoff system for the 1999-200 academic school year is another question.
Thanks for the blog. I hope that it has the response that we desire.
In my most cynical moments, I fight to urge to scream at the “indifference” that “Indianapolis” (for lack of a better term) shows for D-III. We make the wisecracks about the errors in the D-III Championship Handbooks that are made by the intern from some D-I school, who got a big important NCAA job to impress his/her hometown friends.
I wish that we had a “champion” at the NCAA who ran the “D-III” ship as tightly as we would like it to be run. I wish that our “D-III adminstrative staff” burned with the same desire that we have for the student-athletes in D-III. I wish that their “9-to-5” was more than just a job! If it is more than just a job, then I just don’t see it from here in the attention to details in the most visible measures of competency, such as the printed word, Championship Handbooks.
I rail at the times that the NCAA has not implemented all of the bureaucrat-centric drivel that appears in the news releases.
Indianapolis doesn’t seem to identify and implement “best practices”
They do not seem to have a “Division-wide feel” for the way things are presented across the sports, at least to the casual fans. I hope that the AD’s, the Senior Woman Administrators, and SID’s do not have the same complaints.
They definitely do not have an air of transparency about their transactions.
Adopting transparency and “open access” allows smart enthusiastic “fans” of D-III to contribute to the workload of the division. How many D-III fans on these forums has one seen who could make major contributions to the conducting of the championships of the sports. In a division whose major asset is the love of the game by its fans, why not tap into that asset? The way that the information is accumulated, analyzed and interpreted on the message boards, the spirit of the effort is to get the job right! “Transparently right”! Our contributors eagerly ask for proofreading and double-checking of the calculations and data. We are D-III. We are about the student-athlete. We are about the experience. “We are family”.
On the “Shirts, stickers and decals” message board, I enjoy reading about the D-III fans that AF4 (a veterinarian who travels the country in a professional capacity) encounters. It is the camaraderie that Pat Coleman mentions at a “Stone Station”. It is trying to place the face with the name of that person on the message board when he/she has driven 200 miles for a game at “your place”.
I hope that the NCAA will recognize that they need a “Champion” for D-III, that D-III may be the most vibrantly active division of the NCAA. D-III seems to “move mountains with teaspoons” in its joy of what it offers for its student-athletes. Please NCAA. Give us someone with vision, with the authority and the ability to move those mountains, to tap into the energy and wisdom that D-III fans have for “our division”. We want to make the D-III experience better, every season, every sport, every time.
With that previous “post” Ralph has set a new blog record for “Most Quotation Marks used without quoting anyone.”
“Congratulations,” Ralph.
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