The recent departures of Howard Payne’s Chris Kielsmeier and Bowdoin’s Stefanie Pemper should remind us all that coaching in Division III can be fairly transient.

Many great coaches have given their life’s work to Division III. Others have started in Division III and moved on. For the most part, this is the nature of the business. I was talking about this at the Final Four with our colleague, Chris Pesotski, and while I don’t think he agreed fully with my theory, here it is anyway.

Among the top coaches in Division III, we really have two basic groups. I know this may be a little oversimplified, but here goes anyway. There are coaches who are lifers, often working at their alma mater, who love the Division III experience and would never have it any other way. And there are coaches who look to pursue jobs at the scholarship level.

We had three lifers at the men’s Final Four: Not only have Mark Edwards, Dave Hixon and Glenn VanWieren been coaching at their respective schools for decades, they are all coaching at alma mater. I think it was fairly clear Kielsmeier was not a lifer. He had built a great program at Howard Payne, but he had a Division I background and no particular ties to West Texas. And Pemper was beginning to show signs of liferism, but got a good opportunity and is running with it.

It’s hard to tell who’s a lifer and who isn’t for coaches in their 30s and 40s. I would be willing to bet the coaches themselves don’t necessarily know either. But the coaches who have taken Division I head coaching jobs, such as Pemper, Hardin-Simmons/Oklahoma State/Charleston Southern’s Julie Goodenough, or even UW-Platteville/UW-Milwaukee/UW-Madison’s Bo Ryan … and then those who got D-I head coaching jobs after brief assistant coaching stints, such as Catholic/Maryland/Vermont’s Mike Lonergan and King’s/Virginia Commonwealth/Mount St. Mary’s Bryan Whitten, were all relatively young when they left Division III.

OK, not Bo Ryan, but Ryan is the exception to almost every so-called rule.

The point is, we should be glad for our coaches when they move on and up. Ryan talks about his Platteville experiences all the time. They help shine the spotlight on Division III, just a little.

And just a little is good. Really.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad coaches in Division III, and in some instances there isn’t a lot of pressure to get better. That’s good for the institution of pure amateur basketball — no scholarships, no particular emphasis on winning — but bad for the kids who could use more help to reach their full potential. Sometimes ADs don’t have the intestinal fortitude to fire someone, and the win-loss record should never, ever be the only measuring stick. But if the program isn’t improving, and the players aren’t getting as much out of it as they should, isn’t that a reason to change?

We have coaches trying to get back into Division III this summer — recognizable coaches who would make an immediate impact on their school after doing something else or coaching elsewhere for a while. I hope they find what they’re looking for.

Our counter reached 20 million this afternoon, a sort of culmination to a season where our traffic got a bit of a bounce, for once.

No matter what we do, traffic doesn’t seem to move upward for the season until mid-January. When conference play heats up, so does the site. It’s hard to avoid concluding that D3football.com has taken over as the flagship site in our little network here, and not only that, it’s been that way for three or four years.

But 2007-08 went pretty well. It’s hard to judge raw numbers from year to year because the structure of the site keeps changing — some pages got moved offsite last year, others a couple years earlier, etc. And when looking at the milestones, not every day is created equal. It takes about 10 days of May to equal one day in mid-February. So while it took fewer days to go from 16 to 17 million than it did to go from 19 to 20 million, I’ll trade in the 10 days of February 2007 for the five days of April and May.

Thanks to all who read, as always! Spread the word.

Dates for all of the million milestones. We’ve taken them off the front — too many to list. Our front page is very cluttered as it is.

1 million: Jan. 20, 2000
2 million: Dec. 19, 2000
3 million: May 3, 2001
4 million: Feb. 7, 2002
5 million: Nov. 19, 2002
6 million: Feb. 19, 2003
7 million: Oct. 25, 2003
8 million: Feb. 11, 2004
9 million: June 18, 2004
10 million: Jan. 14, 2005
11 million: March 5, 2005
12 million: Nov. 16, 2005
13 million: Feb. 6, 2006
14 million: March 22, 2006
15 million: Dec. 2, 2006
16 million: Feb. 15, 2007
17 million: May 4, 2007
18 million: Dec. 10, 2007
19 million: Feb. 25, 2008
20 million: April 29, 2008

It’s often difficult when a school goes co-ed, and many Division III women’s schools have begun to admit men in recent years. Immaculata, Regis, Lesley, Chestnut Hill (since moved to D-II), Hood and Wheelock are among them. The Atlantic Woman’s Collegiate Conference was a casualty.

Wells College is adding men’s basketball soon as well.

Randolph-Macon Woman’s College became Randolph College after admitting men, and the transition wasn’t easy — not for the teams and certainly not for the campus.

“We applied to a women’s college, and we’re not graduating from one,” said Hillary Peabody, the student government president. “(Men) are the reality of what we don’t want to happen at our school.”

Read the full story, from the jealousy over full stands at a men’s soccer game to a group of hooded figures stalking freshmen in the school’s first co-ed class to a wake-up call in a Roanoke Times feature story by Erinn Hutkin.

I’m sitting here watching Davidson/Kansas (Davidson 51-47 with 7:35 left, for those scoring at home) and my 10-year-old Elizabeth looks up at the television.

Remember, Elizabeth came with me to the regionals at Gettysburg earlier this month and got a real up-close look at what Division III is like as well as what I do on the site.

Elizabeth: “What’s that? It’s basketball, but what division?”
Me: “It’s Division I”
Elizabeth: “Oh. That explains why it’s on TV.”
(Smart girl! And she just closed my parentheses for me. After a pause …)
Elizabeth: “So what’s Division II?”
Me: “Good question”

Then I explained to her that Division II has some scholarships, etc., etc., and she said, “Oh. So it’s second-best.”

I didn’t ask her which was best. Hopefully she knows. 🙂