Great news to get the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s academic rankings this week — I’m always glad to see the student portion of student-athlete get recognized.

Also, they used to come out in August, when it’s so far past the end of the school year that it’s dated to mention it.

Congrats to Hardin-Simmons and the other 23 Division III women’s basketball teams recognized. Hopefully someday the National Association of Basketball Coaches can do the same for men’s basketball.

Happy Fourth of July, to all you Americans out there! (And to you British, well, 231 years of gloating.)

What better place to spend Independence Day than in Taipei, right? That’s what UW-Stout men’s coach Eddie Andrist is doing. He’s coaching the Qatar national team again this summer, as he did the summer he was first hired by the Blue Devils.

Andrist has been blogging about the experience, as his team advanced to the finals of the Friendship Games before falling to Kazakhstan. Follow along and enjoy your Fourth.

For a long time, D3hoops.com, the proverbial granddaddy of the D3sports.com family, has been sitting here with its own unique design. We took on the new look on the front page in October 2000, based off a template sent to us, unsolicited, by a Calvin fan named Martin Wondergem.

We liked it — especially the magnanimity he displayed in designing it in Hope colors.

But … it’s been seven years. It’s time for a change. And we have a design that works well on D3football.com and D3baseball.com. Within the next couple of months, we will be implementing that design for D3hoops.com as well. And as we begin to celebrate our 10th anniversary, we’re ripe for a new look.

It’s about time we extended the brand a little bit. There are still people who seem surprised to hear that the D3football.com people and D3hoops.com people are essentially the same. Making the sites look the same will go a long way toward unifying the entire D3sports.com family just a little bit more.

So we’ve been busy working, not really blogging. Sorry. Just trying to get all our ducks in a row.

We started running D3hoops.com in 1997, in a much simpler time on the Internet. Stories were placed onto pages by hand-coding them in HTML or using some form of web design software. We did things that way until 2004, so as you can imagine, that’s a lot of news.

Those old stories are accessible but not easy to find. I’ve been adding them piecemeal to the newer Notables system so they are linked by date, but it takes a while to accomplish, as I have to go story by story, copying the story and the headline into the database.

So I’m going through the stories from the 1999 and 2000 seasons, and it strikes me how much things have changed.

Times have changed. Glad we’ve been along for the ride.

We just upgraded the software running the Daily Dose to a new version of WordPress. I know that doesn’t mean a whole lot to readers but I thought I would pass it along.

The upgrade allowed me to install the same theme used on the D3baseball.com Daily Dose, tweaking the look for the first time since the blog launched in April 2005. And we’ll eventually be upgrading the D3football.com Daily Dose as well.