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.

This time of year is full of speculation. How many starters does Team X have back? Is the transfer for Team Y any good? What does Team Z need to do to replace its backcourt scoring?

We can only guess. And that’s what a preseason Top 25 is, a guess. Some guesses are more informed than others — for example, the annual magazines make their guess with limited information about Division III. They might hit on some of the good teams, but shoot, they don’t even know who to ask.

In October we ask about 60 schools to provide detailed information about their basketball programs and who is returning. We find out how much of their scoring, rebounding, ball-handling (assists) has graduated and how much is returning. And then we still have to guess. When I was filling out my men’s ballot, I had two teams I knew I wanted No. 1 and No. 2, the two Titans of the midwest (lower-case, not NCAA Midwest Region). The rest was like pulling teeth. When you’re presented with as many as 85 data points on more than 50 teams, it’s information overload.

In the end, here’s what concerns me about the first poll:
As attrition hits teams higher up in the poll (it seems unlikely Illinois Wesleyan or UW-Oshkosh can run the table in such tough conferences), teams such as Puget Sound and St. John Fisher will likely do a slow float to the top. We might see one of them at No. 1 by January.

To a lesser extent, the same goes for Mississippi College, though they are lower in the poll. We simply won’t know how good this team is until the NCAA Tournament comes, since they play one D-III non-conference opponent.

For a team we received no information on, UW-Whitewater is quite high at No. 13. Taking a chance here.

I have to wonder how good Worcester Polytech really is. And Catholic is going to have to be much improved to live up to its No. 25 ranking.

Here’s what I like:
I think the voters made the right call on UW-Stevens Point. There’s always a few voters who give the defending champion the benefit of the doubt until they lose their first game, but it makes sense not to in this case. Too much lost.

In the end, Gustavus Adolphus will end up living up to this ranking, I believe, though they might stumble early in the season as in previous seasons.

I like not giving the Final Four a bye into the Top 10 for the previous year. Only York had anything significant back, and there’s reason to worry about the Spartans as well, considering who they beat and didn’t beat to get to the Final Four last March.

Lesley University and Immaculata University each were formerly all-women’s schools that have started accepting male undergrads in recent years and are starting men’s basketball teams this season.

Zach Rocha of The Standard Times takes us through the Lesley program as it gets underway.