Category Archives: General

Coaching confusion

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Let’s just get this out of the way: I love Minneapolis. Grew up in Minneapolis, went to DeLaSalle High School, would move back there if I could, the whole nine yards.

That doesn’t mean I don’t find Aaron Griess’ decision to go from Chaminade to Augsburg puzzling, to say the least. If Griess didn’t have a Division III background (Colorado College graduate, former Loras grad assistant) I would have to wonder if there were something going on at Chaminade we didn’t know about.

I’m even more confused by Pam Ruder’s move from UW-Oshkosh to Southwestern. Ruder is a WIAC lifer, graduated from Whitewater, was an assistant at Oshkosh and took over as head coach after the Titans’ national title team of 1996. Southwestern had a down year by its recent standards (16 wins in 2003, 15 wins in 2004, nine wins this past year) but has at least been competitive in its conference. That’s not the same as being competitive in the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, one of the top five Division III leagues for women’s basketball.

This is the opposite of the unusual coaching move announced the day before, in which Central, the 1993 national champions, hired Mount Ida head coach Natalie Nakic. She’ll be going from the 40th-best conference in women’s basketball (according to the Massey Ratings, out of 41 Division III conferences) to the 16th-best. She was 34-19 at Mount Ida in two seasons, but 40 of those 53 games were against North Atlantic Conference foes. This is a big leap.

As for Griess, well, I only hope the job comes with a wardrobe allowance. The whole family is going to need it!

Tournament to feature Maryland’s best…

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… or all of Maryland, actually. We learned at the end of the season that the nine Maryland Division III men’s basketball programs have agreed to create an annual tipoff tournament. Each year eight of the nine teams in the state will participate: Frostburg State, Goucher, Hood, Johns Hopkins, McDaniel, Salisbury, St. Mary’s, Villa Julie and Washington College.

The tournament was inspired by the Chase Tournament, which features seven Division III teams and an NAIA team.

That makes us think — there are a few more theme tournaments we could put together at the Division III level.

Consider …

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Letter of bad intentions

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If you read “coverage” of Division III sports this time of year, you probably see this phrase, or one like it, pretty frequently.

So-and-so “signed a letter of intent to play basketball at Division III” Such-and-such College.

This is a lie. Or if it’s true, then it’s an NCAA violation. There is no such thing as a letter of intent in Division III.

From the Division III manual, bylaw 13.10.1:

An institution shall not utilize any form of a letter of intent or similar form of commitment in the recruitment of a prospect. However, it shall be permissible for the institution to utilize in the recruitment of a prospect its pre-enrollment forms executed by prospective students in general at that institution. Violations of this bylaw shall be considered institutional violations per Constitution 2.8.1; however, such violations shall not affect the prospective student-athlete’s eligibility.

I’m not going to name names here — shoot, you can do some Google searches and see the references for yourself. We just don’t know if the schools are misleading the papers or the papers just don’t know what they’re writing about.

Fact is, nothing binds a student-athlete to attend a particular school in Division III, or to play basketball once there. They can abandon their application fee and enrollment deposit and re-enroll anywhere.

This is why ranking recruiting classes in Division III is a fruitless exercise.

Hey, I can see where the schools are coming from. It’s hard to get people unfamiliar with Division III to truly understand how things work here. But we need to educate the rest of the media, educate the public, that Division III is different, and better. Student-athletes aren’t treated any differently, aren’t given any special treatment, and they enter the school the same way everyone else does.

Ignorance is no excuse. Intentionally misleading people is worse.