Category Archives: General

Dear SID: Welcome to the season

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This email is heading off to all Division III Sports Information Directors. If you’re an SID, you should get it through Moravian SID Mark Fleming’s D-III email list. You will want to be on his list to get important notices, research questions and other emails of interest to all D-III schools, so if you’re new, make sure he has your address.

It should be distributed shortly. I’ve included it here without the particulars about logging in.

Dear SID:

Hoping this email finds you well. This will contain notes for all sports we cover: football, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s basketball and baseball. It is primarily a football note, however. There’s a lot here, so I broke it down as follows:

Covered in this email:
Team of the Week changes
Football game day info
Audio/video/live stats links, football and basketball
Basketball schedules
Twitter and Facebook
D3soccer.com Top 25
Links to our site and yours
What We’re Reading
All-Region deadlines, mark your calendar
Contact info

-> Team of the Week changes — We have a trade-out sponsor lined up for the D3football.com and D3hoops.com Team of the Week, something we’re not getting any money for but at least getting some exposure and use of some software that will make distributing info easier. We’re also moving the Team of the Week nomination form behind a login screen — we were getting too many spam or fan/parent nominations, plus, our new system will streamline the creation of the Team of the Week. Last year we lost the guy who had been doing the TOW for three or four years and I went back to choosing the team and assembling the pages myself. If you don’t have your D3sports login (what you use to nominate for our All-Americans and All-Region teams) contact me sooner rather than later. Those of you who have let coaches do the nominating will need to let me know if you want them to get usernames and passwords to access that function.

-> Football game day info — We would love to have all sorts of information on game day. Before the game, you can post a link to your game notes or preview through Presto, or post them in their entirety on our site with your D3sports login. The PrestoSports system is capable of handling in-progress scores, which will be updated automatically if you use Presto’s live stats software. Otherwise, you or someone on your game day crew can update scores as often as you like. Even if it’s just after every quarter, it’s of tremendous use to fans, who flock to our Scoreboard page all day long. After the game, we would love to have the final score and your game story, both of which can be posted through Presto’s space.

-> Audio/video/live stats links, football and basketball — if you have live video, live audio or live stats. We will publish your video links even if they are pay per view, so if you want to increase your audience, make sure you get the links on our scoreboard. That will require your PrestoSports login. You could email me your links and ask us to post them; however, we’ll do that on an as-time-permits basis. It’s going to be faster for you to post them yourself.

-> Basketball schedules — we have about two-thirds of the schedule on the site already. If you’re a Presto school or conference, remember we will get your schedule automatically when you post it for your conference. Please use “Site Notes” instead of “Notes” for notes about your games, whether they are homecoming, alumni day, senior day, whatever. That way those notes appear solely on your site and not on your opponents’ site (or ours).

-> Are you on Twitter? Are you following @d3hoops, @d3football, @d3baseball and are we following you? We follow every D-III athletics feed we can find and some of the general school feeds if they’re interesting. Please drop me a line if we aren’t following you. We’ll continue to retweet out interesting SID tweets, which will push people to your site instead of ours. Same with Facebook — D3football.com and D3hoops.com will become fans of your pages as we learn of them and hopefully yours will do the same.

-> D3soccer.com Top 25 — Some of you were approached about voting in our first soccer Top 25 poll. Jim Matson has been following up with SIDs on that list as well as coaches to make up the voter list. The poll should be released on Tuesdays during the regular season and we thank those of you who will be voting. Soccer game releases can be posted directly on D3soccer.com with your D3sports login.

-> Links to our site and yours — We already link to your site and we would love a link in return. (Men’s soccer links will be going on the site this month, with women’s to follow.) As more schools go with outside companies, we’ve lost a lot of the links we used to have from schools. Please consider linking to D3baseball.com, D3football.com, D3hoops.com and D3soccer.com from your appropriate sports’ main pages (and please note that the b, f, h and s are all lower-case). I can provide a logo 125 px wide to fit on most templates, but have not included it with this email to keep the size down.

-> What We’re Reading — We started linking to outside news sources’ stories last season with the What We’re Reading boxes. They appear on the front page of D3football and D3hoops and on the blogs for D3football, D3hoops and D3baseball. If you have an interesting feature story in your area, drop me a line with the link.

-> All-Region nomination deadlines, mark your calendar — Just an early heads-up: Football nomination deadline is Wednesday, Nov. 25. Basketball nomination deadline is Tuesday, March 9. We will absolutely send out more info closer to the end of the season.

-> Contact info
Football and basketball (and hopefully 2010 baseball) game day info:
Log in at Presto with Presto username and password.

All D3sports.com weekly, regional and national nominations, all soccer game stories, other non-game releases for all sports:
Log in at the respective D3sports.com data entry site with D3sports username and password:

Also, thanks to everyone who helped us with Kickoff 2009 on D3football.com, whether with a photo or helping us talk to your coach, some of them at the last minute. See you in Salem, or Bloomington, or Appleton, or Greensboro.

D3football.com, D3hoops.com: Pat Coleman
info@d3sports.com for general inquiries, news@d3sports.com for releases

D3soccer.com: Jim Matson
info@d3soccer.com for general inquiries, news@d3soccer.com for releases

D3baseball.com: Jim Dixon
info@d3baseball.com for general inquiries, news@d3baseball.com for releases

Pat Coleman
D3sports.com

D-III newbies look peachy

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Three schools were approved for provisional membership in Division III this upcoming season, according to a news release from one of the schools. (The NCAA doesn’t appear to have said anything on the subject yet.)

Covenant College, in Lookout Mountain, Ga., and Berry College, in Mount Berry, Ga., join Division III, chipping into the NAIA’s dominance of the Southeast, as does Penn State-Abington.

Covenant's Crosson Reed “Both academically and athletically, NCAA Division III is a good fit for Berry,” said Steve Briggs, Berry’s president. “We have always placed a high priority on academic achievement and the overall quality of the educational experience for our student-athletes, and affiliation with Division III allows us to be true to these fundamental values while also growing our athletic program in new and exciting ways.”

Berry’s release mentions something else that doesn’t get a lot of discussion around here: the shorter seasons in Division III. NAIA starts basketball competition, for example, weeks before Division III schools do, resulting in increased class time missed. Covenant references Division III’s lower dues, reduced travel time and expenses, and costs of postseason play which are picked up.

Berry is adding men’s and women’s swimming and diving and softball for the upcoming school year, as well as women’s lacrosse in the spring of 2011, as Division III requires sponsorship of more sports than the NAIA does.

Covenant has 13 sports already, while Abington has 12. Neither will need to add sports to make the Division III minimum.

Obviously the entire future of the Great South Athletic Conference is up in the air, with talks continuing that they may end up merging with the USA South. But if the GSAC remains an independent unit, Covenant and Berry would be an ideal geographic fit.

Coming attractions: Centenary (La.)

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Yesterday the Centenary College Board of Trustees voted to “reposition” the Louisiana-based school from Division I to Division III in two years. Until then the Ladies and Gents (great nicknames) sports teams will compete in Division I’s Summit League.

We’ve been following this story on the Daily Dose this summer. Check out earlier posts including some very insightful commentary from Ralph Turner.

The Case for Centenary (La.) and Division III

Conference cost cutters

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Economic problems have not spared Division III member institutions. Financial struggles have claimed Colorado College and Blackburn football, are close to claiming UW-La Crosse baseball and are threatening Greensboro College entirely.

Note: Principia also discontinued football but has publicly stated finances were not the reason.

Against that backdrop, some conferences are taking measures to cut costs. The WIAC announced a Cost Reduction Plan especially targeted at cutting travel costs. Elements of the Plan include:

• Later start times to minimize hotel stays
• Conference playoffs limited to six teams
• Restricting teams to no more than one trip during the regular-season outside of an established regional perimeter.
• Exploring the feasibility of scheduling one additional WIAC football team as a nonconference game beginning with the 2011 season.

The Conference’s release cites $250,000 in direct budget savings associated with these moves, but it’s hard to spot exactly how it impacts football or basketball in 2009-2010. The men’s and women’s basketball tournaments were already at six teams last year. Conference Commissioner Gary Karner clarified that the regional perimeter is not defined by the administrative regions (west for football and men’s basketball; central for women’s basketball) so games against the CCIW, MIAC and MWC aren’t affected. The regional perimeter is also not defined by the very broad geographic region that stretches from Texas to California anyway. Of course, the WIAC is much more than three sports, so these actions may very well have a stronger impact elsewhere.

Nevertheless, this is a good move that seeks a conference-wide solution instead of leaving individual institutions to fend for themselves with whatever level of resources they have. Since all these public institutions have the same resource base (Wisconsin tax payers), equity is particularly important.

Members of the Centennial Conference are also working together to reduce costs. Executive Director Steve Ulrich reports that the Conference will limit the size of travel squads to the NCAA championship max plus 20 percent and change starting times to avoid overnight trips. Other measures will impact Conference championships in indoor track and field and golf. Two conference members also had a unique swim meet in which both teams were the home teams.

Bard to the Liberty League. Oh, and RIT.

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With all respect to Rochester Institute of Technology, I think the decision to admit Bard to the Liberty League is the most intriguing part of the transaction that we broke the news about last week and was formally announced today.

(Are you following us on Twitter yet?)

It’s the case of Bard continuing to climb the conference-level ladder over the past few years despite not becoming more competitive. Yes, the soccer teams were around .500 last year, the cross country teams did well in the Skyline meet and there were some bright spots, but .500 in the Skyline does not equal .500 in the Liberty League. Bard lost to Vassar, a team around the .500 mark, 5-0 in men’s soccer and 6-0 in women’s soccer. And it’s an even longer way from the NEAC, where Bard was until two years ago, to the Liberty League.

In men’s basketball, Bard went 1-24 this past season and did not play a Liberty League team. The women were 5-20. Until the past two seasons, Bard women’s basketball did not even play a full 25-game schedule.

Bard is getting into a league with a lot of schools with similar academic goals and the like. But it’s not at all on the same playing field athletically. Bard reported to the U.S. Department of Education that it spent $556,802 on athletics in the last reported year. I won’t compare them to the schools in the LL with Division I hockey, but compared to the $2.28 million that Vassar spent that year, it’s clear Bard is not in the ballpark.

One can only hope that the school made the conference some assurances that it would cut into that gap and take athletics a little more seriously.