Meet the Insiders: Holly Harvey

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Each year we invite a handful of men’s and women’s basketball players to provide us with insight on their season as it unfolds. This year we have a very interesting mix that covers a wide range of the Division III landscape. Let’s meet the first Insider who would like to finish her season right where it’s starting.

Kicking Off Titan Basketball Season

Hello fans, I am Holly Harvey and I am a junior guard on the Illinois Wesleyan Women’s Basketball Team. Wesleyan is located in Bloomington, IL just down the road from Illinois State University. There are many things about IWU that drew me to the school as a high school senior, such as its great academic reputation, nice campus, strong athletics, and overall positive atmosphere. The women’s basketball program made my college choice easy. The team dynamic was awesome, everyone got along well and I saw myself fitting right in. I stayed to play pick-up with the team and quickly learned that every player had passion for the game, a desire to win, and team mentality. I also found it easy to communicate with Coach Smith and was impressed with some of her coaching strategies that she shared.

I believe that the team characteristics I first noticed on my visit are major reasons for IWU Women’s Basketball’s recent success. Last year we finished with the impressive record of 30-1, however we didn’t reach our ultimate goals of the Final Four and a National Championship. This year is special because Illinois Wesleyan is the host of the Women’s Basketball Final Four. Nothing compares to playing at the Shirk Center in front of the home crowd. Everyone on the team is dreaming of playing in the national championship on our home court and we are working hard to fulfill that goal. However, before we look ahead to the NCAA Tournament, there are other goals that will need to be met before that.

We will be hosting The Tip Off Tournament which includes Washington University, DePauw University, and Central College. We won the tournament last year and are looking for a repeat this year. Following the tournament, we have a more challenging pre-conference schedule than previous years. We are hoping that the tougher competition will prepare us for conference play and the post season. Our goal is to repeat as the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin champions.

We have been working hard this pre-season to reach our season goals. Our practices have been competitive and we have been improving along the way. We had a scrimmage against Illinois Central College early in the pre-season. We saw a lot of good things at the scrimmage. Our defense looked very solid, especially our 2-3 zone. Offensively we pushed the ball up and got some good looks in transition. We also saw a number of good things from our freshman class.

We just had an exhibition game with Division I 17th ranked DePaul University. Though the outcome did not go as well as planned, as we lost 93-49, I believe it was a tremendous learning experience for the team. We watched film the very next morning and pin pointed some of our weaknesses in the game such as getting open on the wing, defensive rotations, and the transition game. We hit the floor after film and worked on those weaknesses and had a very productive practice. We all agreed that we never wanted to lose by 40 again and put the game behind us. We are now looking forward to starting the season with our first game at home against Blackburn College on November 17th at 7 P.M.

Don’t D-III teams want to win?

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Some misguided sports psychologist studied a soccer team and a tennis team and came to the following conclusion:

Division I athletes wanted to win, but those playing in Division III wanted to make friends.

I think all of us here know that’s not true. Thankfully, Division III has a sports psychologist of its own: St. Thomas men’s basketball assistant coach John Tauer. He wrote a response to this blog:

The majority of Division III athletes I have coached or coached against are highly motivated by many factors, not just making friends. one of those factors is competition — individuals and teams in Division III work incredibly hard. Division III athletes are not on athletic scholarships. As a result, they may actually have higher levels of intrinsic motivation than their Division I and II counterparts.

While this is certainly preaching to the choir, I still think it’s worth passing along. I think it’s important to highlight and debunk every misconception about Division III athletics, every time possible.

All-Star Game a welcome change

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The Division III third-place game is an anachronism and its time has passed. So it’s good to see it go.

Although indeed, sometimes the third-place game is a spirited, wide-open entertaining affair, it cannot be ignored that the game often features one, if not two teams that truly don’t want to be there. Someone has had their heart ripped out the night before, must come back for a walk-through the next morning (though often a coach will pass on the team’s allotted time) and play a game which doesn’t do much except allow one team to go home with an extra win.

Of course, someone goes home with two losses at the end of a season that should be celebrated.

So, for the NABC to step in and do something immensely positive for Division III men’s basketball is a great step forward for our game. We hope the WBCA will consider doing something for women’s basketball as well.

This will give an additional 16 or so players who never would have gotten the Salem experience a chance to perform in front of Division III fans and be recognized. Fans who drove to southwestern Virginia to see their team play will have reason to stick around and see their best senior player or players in action the next day. And they’ll get to see a bunch of All-Americans on the floor as well, giving some context to fans who don’t get to watch D-III games on television.

It’s a win-win. And I hope it stays a part of the Salem experience for many years to come, like the NABC has done for Division I and Division II.

Midnight madness in D-III

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The first day of practice is not that far away, on Oct. 15. And while many schools will hold a late-night “practice” in front of fans to kick off the season, we have a pair of truly mad games going on at midnight on Nov. 15, the first day games can be played.

Chatham is going to kick off the Division III basketball season for us at 12:01 a.m. EST on Nov. 15, which is a Saturday night/Sunday morning. They’ll be hosting Wilson.

“We are very excited about this unique opportunity,” Chatham coach Mark Katarski said. “We spoke with Wilson College about the idea last winter, and both agreed that it would be a great experience for the student-athletes and our fans.”

Following one hour later, St. Norbert is going to be hosting Silver Lake, a non-Division III school, in a game tipping off at midnight CST Sunday morning. The Green Knights have a long non-off day in between and host UW-Oshkosh at 7 p.m. CT on Monday.

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