Welcome to our tenth birthday, unofficially. Although we’ve (mostly I’ve) only been running this site for eight years, the site was founded for the 1995-96 season by the Centennial Conference and Steve Ulrich. It was groundbreaking for its time as one of the few Web sites of any kind, let alone one covering Division III sports.

As the 1997-98 basketball season neared, I noticed the site was getting a little dusty. I was back in the sports information business at the time, moonlighting a few days a week as SID at Gallaudet when they were between people (Brett Marhanka and Steve Feit, for the insanely curious). I had spent two years running a basketball page covering the Capital Athletic Conference and was interested in doing more, so I asked Ulrich if he was interested in having someone take over.

Well, within a couple hours I had e-mail with attachments right and left, and a few days after that (before we were ready, actually), they threw a link over to us. The site has morphed several times since then into what you see now.

And although we don’t have a picture of it to show you, how many people remember the spinning basketball graphic that was on the original front page. Show of hands?

So here we are now, recording every result, running our own poll, broadcasting games. We have a good number of like-minded people who volunteer on the site, collecting info and the like. We went out and found some interns to help on the site this year, another step for us. We just passed the 12 million mark on the front page.

And all that on a site I thought would take a few hours a night, two or three nights a week. Silly me. I had no idea there were so many Division III fans out there. But we have all seen the strength in numbers.

Keep up the good work, fans.

We don’t have all the schedules in yet, so we’ll probably end up leaving some games off, but with 95% of the games in the system hopefully anything will be minor.

Here’s some of the games to keep an eye on this weekend, as games tip off Friday:

Tourney twosome: To call it a battle would be overstating it, but should be interesting to see the Texas-Dallas men, which pulled off three upsets to make the NCAA Tournament at 15-13 last year, go up against No. 1 Illinois Wesleyan on Friday night. Probably more like a rude awakening.

Plenty of 20: Baldwin-Wallace’s men open Friday with St. John Fisher on a neutral floor at Westminster (Pa.). B-W went 20-9, St. John Fisher 28-1.

Recipie for confusion: Aurora, from the same state as MacMurray, plays McMurry, from Texas, at Wheaton of Illinois’ tournament. Guarantee you at least one newspaper story or press release puts an A in McMurry.

Who are these guys? That’s the theme of the season for Christopher Newport, which opens the season with Southern Virginia. They also play St. Joseph of Vermont, Maryland Bible, Fisher College (not St. John Fisher, of course), Maine-Presque Isle and Keystone, plus they will play either Maryland Bible or Southern Virginia a second time since both are in their Thanksgiving tournament. Sorry. Only one turkey at that tournament, and it’s CNU’s schedule, with a whopping one in-region non-conference game, five games against non-Division III members and two more against provisional D-III members.

Opposite end of the spectrum: Couple of interesting games Friday at F&M’s tournament with Trinity (Conn.) facing Cortland State and F&M hosting what’s left of Gwynedd-Mercy after the end of Badou Gaye’s collegiate career.

Sleeper pick: St. Thomas against UW-Stout, which are less than two hours apart but meet at Wooster on Friday night..

Can you go home again? We’ll find out Sunday, as Randolph-Macon’s men’s coach Michael Rhoades gets set to perhaps face his alma mater. The All-American guard helped lead LVC to a national title and brings his team north to face either Arcadia or LVC.

In women’s action, those who felt Williams should have gotten preseason poll consideration will get to find out right away, as the Ephs play Southern Maine at Maine-Farmington’s tipoff tournament. Elsewhere in first-weekend women’s games:

Big bracket: Not the NCAA one, the tournament at Marymount, which has Gettysburg taking on Wesleyan, Trinity (Texas) against Gwynedd-Mercy, Elizabethtown at Marymount, and King’s at North Park. Whoever comes out 3-0 will have deserved it.

Getting defensive: No. 1 Millikin starts its quest for another Walnut and Bronze on Friday by opening with Webster. They also host UW-Eau Claire on Sunday.

Saturday’s no walk in the park: How about scheduling for Randolph-Macon’s women as the No. 2 Yellow Jackets host No. 12 Springfield on the second day of their tipoff classic?

Northeast notable: No. 8 Brandeis could end up with Bates on the second day of its tournament. Wonder what Bates will be like without Olivia Zurek and last year’s seniors.

Into the fire: Southwestern coach Pam Ruder, who came in from UW-Oshkosh this offseason, gets an early baptism Saturday with a game at No. 24 Hardin-Simmons.

Sunday on the air: If Eastern Connecticut and No. 3 Bowdoin meet Sunday afternoon in the finals of Eastern Connecticut’s tournament, we’ll be there and will broadcast it for you. There will be details out front.

Feel free to chime in with neat storylines, interesting games from the upcoming week, through next Sunday.

I’m as eager for the start of basketball as the rest of you, but to be honest, I could really use another week. We got really poor, in my opinion, help from schools on schedules this year, so we’re still catching up on those. Although we got the Top 25s out earlier than our target date, the preseason All-America teams were slower than usual. One of those is still on our plate.

I love Division III basketball, but why does tipoff have to overlap with the start of football playoffs? I can’t find enough time in the day to get everything done as it is, and now with three kids in the house I’m finding it harder and harder to get time to work on the sites.

I have a tech guy who is holding up the process, who can never make a deadline, and since I’m related to him I have to play nice. He has a to-do list that’s pretty long, which we may never get to. Some of the things have been on the list for more than a year.

And now I’m griping to you, the reader, which probably isn’t the best thing either. But I write to tell you this — although it looks like we might not be doing much on the site this time of year, it just isn’t true. What we’re doing is a bunch of behind-the-scenes work, getting the schedules (still) into the system, making sure score reporting works correctly. Dave McHugh is working on getting Hoopsville warmed up and ready to go, starting a week from now, almost a week to the minute from the time this post goes up. So I ask your patience. This isn’t the only job for any of us, and my full-time job has gotten a lot fuller in the past 12 months, as well as my house.

Stay tuned. We’ll get there.

Halloween is a pretty good day for the Pioneers as Transylvania has been voted as the men’s basketball frontrunner in the 2005-06 Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference, released Oct. 31. The Pioneers, defending HCAC co-champions, received six first-place votes in the coaches’ preseason poll. They garnered 62 points overall in the poll outdistancing fellow defending co-champion Hanover.

Hanover received the remaining two first-place votes and 52 total points. Franklin was picked third with 43 points in the poll. Bluffton (41 points), Mount St. Joseph (29), Manchester (26), Anderson (21) and Defiance (14) round out the poll.

Transylvania captured its first HCAC championship last season by tying for first place in the standings with Hanover. The Pioneers finished with a 20-6 overall record and 11-3 mark in the HCAC.
Returning are a pair of first-team all-HCAC selections. Junior forward Joey Searle led Transy in scoring last year with a 14.5 average and added 5.4 rebounds per game. Senior forward Matt Finke returns after posting 12.6 points and 6.5 boards per contest.

Transylvania, led by last season’s HCAC Coach of the Year Brian Lane, returns four starters and lost just two players to graduation.

Hanover, ranked ninth in the D3hoops.com preseason Top 25, will look to return to the NCAA Division III Sweet 16 again this season. The Panthers advanced deep into last season’s tournament and will return three starters from that squad. They completed the 2004-05 season with an 11-3 conference record and 25-6 overall mark.