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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.

Now, neither Division III school in the nation’s capital will be a member of the Capital Athletic Conference. Catholic left for the Landmark Conference early in the shuffle.

When we last left the NEAC, they were dipping into Texas in hopes of maintaining their tenuous automatic bid. With no details, we were left to wonder whether they were going to incorporate the University of Dallas into their round-robin schedule or base their entire automatic bid on a three-game conference tournament.

They chose the latter.

With two members who are still in the provisional membership stage of joining Division III, the league needed a D-III member to tide them over. Gallaudet will fill that hole and allow the league to cut ties with Dallas if it chooses.

Although Gallaudet was on probation with the Capital Athletic Conference, they were not booted from the conference, rather, they left of their own accord. And in the NEAC, they will spend a lot more money on travel, but they should be somewhat competitive in some sports.

Even I am beginning to get lost with the shuffling. D’Youville is out of the NEAC for next year, shuffling to the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference. The AMCC seems like it will lose Frostburg State, which was just offered membership in the Capital Athletic Conference for 2010-11. With Stevenson’s football program all but a done deal, perhaps for 2011, that would give the CAC four football programs: Frostburg State, Salisbury, Stevenson and Wesley.

The NEAC 2009-10 lineup looks like this: Cazenovia, Keuka, Penn State-Abington (provisional D-III), Penn State-Berks, Penn State-Harrisburg (provisional D-III), St. Elizabeth (no men’s basketball), SUNY-Cobleskill (provisional D-III), SUNY-Morrisville (provisional D-III), SUNYIT, University of Dallas, Wells (no women’s basketball) and Wilson (no men’s basketball).

With the CAC in a position to potentially sponsor football in 2011, more pieces will fall. Stay tuned.

The other Division III conference is reported to be the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference, whose presidents are scheduled to meet in the next 1-2 weeks. The report also said that two other D-1 conferences were being evaluated.

Thursday’s Shreveport Times reported on a news conference held by men’s basketball coach Greg Gary who completed his first year as head coach. Gary said that he thought D-I was the place for Centenary.

Centenary College, a private liberal arts college of 854 undergrads, and its athletic community are at a crossroads.

Centenary College has been a member of the Summit League, a non-football D-1 conference formerly known as the Mid-Continent Conference, since 2003. The Summit League spans nine states with its 10 full members, from Oakland College in Rochester, Mich., to Southern Utah in Cedar City, Utah. All other members are state schools except Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa. Four Summit League members play FCS football.

Travel from Shreveport to the rest of the league requires one and two layovers in major hubs. Air travel out of Shreveport goes to Memphis, DFW, Houston Intercontinental and Atlanta. There is no direct flight to Chicago from Shreveport, a feature that Oral Roberts in Tulsa enjoys. Fellow Summit league member Oral Roberts is still 347 miles away from Shreveport.

Centenary was recently placed on a postseason ban in men’s basketball for poor Academic Progress Rates (APR). The Centenary baseball program was also under scrutiny for APR issues in 2008-09.

The economic downturn is said to have decreased earnings from Centenary endowments by $1.5 million. The National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) 2008 report gave Centenary’s endowment at $118 million as of June 30, 2008. Centenary reported that the endowment was down 20% this year. The 2008 endowment was less than nearby D-III schools Austin, Southwestern and Trinity (Texas).

Centenary currently awards scholarships in men’s and women’s basketball, golf, soccer, swimming and tennis, baseball, softball and women’s gymnastics and volleyball. Full D-I funding for those varsity sports would entail 107.9 men’s scholarships and 112 scholarships for women, roughly 25% of the undergraduate student body. At current tuition rates of $22,000 per year, that is $4.8 million for 219.9 scholarships, a sum greater than the annual yield of the entire endowment at a prudent 4% rate of draw.

The challenge to find another D-I conference in the south is problematic. The Southland Conference is comprised of D-I (FCS for football) schools from Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. All 12 members are public schools. Eight currently play football. Two more have announced the addition/restoration of football, and one is studying restoring football. The announced fundraising efforts to accomplish this have been in the tens of millions of dollars.

The Sun Belt Conference is a BCS-football conference of 13 schools over eight states including Louisiana. Louisiana Tech is in the Western Athletic Conference. The other, better known D-I options are not plausible.

Centenary has not mentioned the option of a non-football D-II conference, which would be the Heartland Conference, which extends the 1050 miles from Laredo, Texas to Jefferson City, Missouri.

So, Centenary has two options in Division III.

The American Southwest Conference is a 15-member conference in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi that is divided into two divisions, East and West. The eight-member West Division is west and south of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Centenary is right in the middle of the seven-member East Division. Six of the seven ASC-East members are within a three-hour bus ride on the interstate from Shreveport. Being the eighth member would balance the “travel partner” schedule used by the ASC.

The ASC sponsors every varsity sport that Centenary offers except swimming and women’s gymnastics. Several ASC members have varsity or club swimming programs. men’s club lacrosse, which Centenary has, is being explored by a few ASC schools. Centenary swimming might be the catalyst for the ASC to add the sport. Women’s gymnastics might be the only casualty in a move to D-III. The membership of the ASC has seen four members add football in the last decade, which would also be an option for Centenary.

The case that the ASC makes is almost complete accommodation for Centenary’s sports, geographic proximity, and a minimum of missed class time. The ASC offered charter membership to Centenary when the conference was formed in 1996. The conference would presumably love to have Centenary.

The Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference is expected to receive the Centenary delegation at its Presidents’ meeting later this month. Although geographically more dispersed than the ASC, the SCAC can host all of Centenary’s sports except varsity gymnastics. The burgeoning interest in men’s lacrosse in the SCAC is also a plus for Centenary’s club team. If Centenary follows the model used by Birmingham-Southern when it announced its move to D-III in 2006, then male sports such as football and lacrosse are integral to the strategy. Centenary’s re-instituting football could become the SCAC’s 10th football program. The current male: female ratio of the student body is 42:58. Adding football might bring that closer to parity. (The SCAC does not sponsor women’s gymnastics either.)

The “fit” as a peer institution is what may give the SCAC its inside track. Centenary is one of 16 schools in the Associated Colleges of the South.

Fellow ACS members in the SCAC include Birmingham-Southern, Centre, Hendrix, Millsaps, Rhodes, Sewanee, Southwestern and Trinity (Texas). (Other D-III schools in the ACS include Spelman and Washington and Lee.)

Centenary would strengthen the western side of the SCAC. The SCAC has maintained that it wants to be a 12-member conference, but Colorado College’s decision to drop football this spring probably took some of the luster of having the Colorado Springs, Colo., school in the league. DePauw, in Greencastle, Ind., is another geographically isolated member of the conference. Since the SCAC uses a travel partner format for scheduling, the departure of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (Terre Haute, Ind.) from the SCAC because of travel constraints and missed class time for its student-athletes has made DePauw’s isolation more pronounced.

Centenary joined the Summit League in 2003. It has won an average of seven games in men’s basketball in the last five seasons. The budget crunch that has hit all college athletic programs seems to be affecting Centenary. B. David Rowe will become the 12th president of Centenary on August 1st. Dr Rowe is a Southwestern grad and has spent time at Emory and LaGrange. He has a solid D-III background. However, the decision may be made by the time that he begins.

The Centenary board has hard decisions to make, but Division III athletics seems to have more plusses than minuses for a school that prides itself in its academic reputation.

This comes from a recent Q&A with a university president, in the NCAA’s Champion magazine:

What attracted you to Division II?
O’Brien: The critical issue is balance. When I was an undergrad at Auburn, there was less commercialization in athletics. I was in classes with the athletes and in a fraternity with them; I think that’s what Division II is all about now. Student-athletes first and foremost are students, as they were in the 1960s. So even though I was in Division I as a student and as an administrator for many years, I’ve always identified with that aspect of intercollegiate athletics in a higher education institution. It wasn’t a foreign concept to me.

What’s so special about Division II?
O’Brien: The student-athletes themselves. Interacting with them, you know they are here primarily for an education, but they also are following their passion. They get to compete in intercollegiate volleyball and soccer and basketball and golf, but they also are getting their education.

Pat O’Brien (no, not that one) is the president of West Texas A&M. What he described about Division II may well be special, but it’s hardly unique. This is what Division III is all about. Division II student-athletes are certainly there to get their education, but they’re being compensated for playing sports. They may be following their passion, but with many of them on scholarship, it’s not the same.

This is why it’s hard to define Division III’s identity without referencing other divisions. Here’s at least one of them, a member of Division II’s Presidents Council if I interpret the article’s vague reference correctly, defining Division II the same way we would define Division III.

Division III needs to stand up for its own identity and not let Division II co-opt it.

Published a new blog post: Mondays with Myles and Friends: DIII Identity

This from the NCAA’s official blog, the Double-A Zone. So I was hoping this would be some serious discussion of the issues facing Division III and its struggles to gain attention in a noisy collegiate athletics landscape.

In five minutes of interview, admittedly, that would be tough to do.

Unfortunately, even in the NCAA’s attempt to promote this concept, it drops the ball. It’s hard to take a program seriously when it mispronounces the name of the guest right out of the gate. And maybe I’m nitpicking, but the NCAA’s Twitter message promoting the interview had a broken link — at least, it didn’t fit in Twitter’s 140-character limit.

But it’s hard to expect more when the national office has so many people who don’t care about Division III.

Anyway, here’s the interview with NCAA vice president for Division III Dan Dutcher. (That’s in case the embed below doesn’t work for you.)

That’s why it’s so disappointing to have to tell you that Patrick died this past week of a staph infection. He was just 44.

I don’t know more details than that. Patrick’s brother sings in our church choir and he was not there this morning. When our director told us why he was absent, my heart sank.

I know Patrick left a lasting impression at Wash U. Mark Edwards, the men’s basketball coach, has talked more than once about Patrick as his student manager in the 1980s. Patrick was in Salem last year when the Bears brought home their first Division III men’s basketball national title.

But his lasting legacy to Division III basketball fans was his data, and his analysis over the past decade. Years before D3hoops.com was doing the same, Patrick was collecting schedules and results for every Division III basketball team, and calculating his own ranking out of this. Over the past year or so, it became clear his projections were pretty darn good, and worthy of whatever credence and prominence we could give them. His 2002-03 data got us started with publishing schedules and results for all team, a jump-start without which we might not have gotten started for several more years.

I still have his 2001-02 data on my hard drive, and one of my long list of items for this summer was to incorporate that into the site, then try to get more data from him for previous years.

Here’s some of the last data he analyzed for Division III fans:

Final regular-season Pool C rankings for men
Final regular-season Pool C rankings for women

And here’s an interesting post, in which Patrick discusses the effect one game can have on a team’s playoff chances.

We’ll miss you, Patrick, and Division III will miss you.

Now, honestly, I think the Division III community knows what Division III is all about, and though I know some differ over whether some schools should be Division III members, I don’t share their opinions. To me, any school willing to sponsor a broad-based athletics program without athletic scholarships is welcome in Division III, whether they have 422 full-time undergraduates (Southern Vermont) or 19,914 (NYU).

But the general public, or even the general sports fan, doesn’t necessarily understand this. And Division III schools have started the process of defining that identity and communicating it in the same way Division II has. To that end, the NCAA is beginning the process of collecting ideas about said identity and distilling it down.

I was honored to be considered worthy of comment on this issue by the NCAA, and spent about an hour on the phone with a consultant a couple days after the D-III Final Four.

Here’s what I told the consultant who called:

We talked briefly about the history of the site (he was surprised to find I was not an NCAA employee), the Division IV movement, how D-III is the highest form of purely amateur sports (my words), “the love of the game,” and the so-called national championship tournament.

He also asked about common misconceptions people have of Division III, and I certainly had a boatload of them for him, since I hear them from all sides. Briefly:

• Division III is glorified intramurals, no better than high school ball. This couldn’t be further from the truth, of course, and anyone who has played Division III knows that. But that’s the mantra of some people, often coaches who measure themselves by the number of athletic scholarships their players go on to get. I’ve been collecting stories and quotes from people who get to Division III schools and are surprised by the level of competition. Just in case more debunking is needed.
• Division III is for small liberal arts colleges. There are certainly a lot of small liberal arts colleges in Division III, but that doesn’t mean that public schools, large research institutions and everything else in between can be Division III members. And, to the WIAC haters, I’m sorry, but they have just as much right to be here as you do.
• Division III is a community. More so than other levels, Division III fans have a camaraderie with each other off the floor or away from the stadium that I don’t see at other levels. There’s a sense of “we’re all in this together” among die-hard Division III fans, where fans of opposing teams will tailgate together before games. I suspect that most interaction between fans of D-I schools in a parking lot are not so friendly.
• Division III has a national championship. Sorry, not in men’s basketball, it doesn’t. It has a handful of regional championships that all send representatives to the Final Four. For as much time as we spent explaining to people why the NCAA’s bracket is set up this way on Matchup Monday, we spent even more time later in the tournament explaining to people why Wash U faced its toughest opponents the first two weekends.

Now, unfortunately, time ran out on us and while I had made some notes ahead of the call, I didn’t get everything said. Here’s what I didn’t get a chance to get out:

We try to make Division III still feel like it’s big time for the student-athletes, coaches, parents and fans involved. And having just come back from Salem, I know that what we do is noticed. The NCAA does do this as well, don’t get me wrong, but it also doesn’t do this.

The NCAA has certainly worked over the past few years to really enhance the student-athlete experience in terms of the things happening around the competition itself. But it’s time to work on the competition, too. And in basketball especially, that means enhancing the national nature of the NCAA Tournament. Too often money is used as an excuse as to why we can’t do things in Division III, and I get that — I, too, don’t want to see The College of New Jersey or Amherst flying off to St. Louis or St. Paul or Tacoma, Wash., for the first round of the NCAA Tournament, either. But when there’s a choice between sending UW-Whitewater or Wash U. to Elmhurst for the first round or to Centre, both are bus trips and one makes the tournament more national, why in the world aren’t we doing that?

Support for Division III within the NCAA office needs to be better. Why are D-III’s championships handbooks riddled with errors? Why are D3sports.com personnel and Division III fans having to tell the NCAA sports committees who is eligible for its championships? Why aren’t the committee members well-versed enough in the handbook to know that sectionals need All-Tournament teams?

Division II spent a lot of money trying to find its identity. In Division III, the identity is much clearer. If we spend a little money communicating that, great, let’s go for it. That way we won’t have to answer as many questions from parents as to how they can get an athletic scholarship to a Division III school.

But, if we really have money to spend, let’s spend it on making the national championship an actual national championship, not four regional championships that all happen to send their winners to Salem.

Guests included:
- Wash U. Coach Mark Edwards
- F&M Coach Glenn Robinson
- Wash U. forward Tyler Nading
- George Fox center Kristen Shielee

We also heard from Gordon Mann, Bob Quillman, and Pat Coleman. We also listened back to the 2009 Championship Tournament.

And before I sign off, I do want to thank everyone who participated in our 6th season of Hoopsville. I certainly appreciate those coaches, players, and other guests who took times out of their evenings to join us to chat. I also tremendously appreciate the efforts made by each and every regional reporter (Bob Quillman, JC DeLass, Gordon Mann, Mark Simon, and Pat Coleman) for the time they took to give us reports throughout the season, dedicating certainly much of their time to the show. Without all of those guests and reporters, Hoopsville would not be close to the program fans of Division III know they can turn to for information on basketball around the country.

Thank you and see you next season for our 7th!

By now, you’ve heard the story several times already. The Bruins graduated all five starters and added 10 first year players to a trio of juniors and senior Kristen Shielee whose play before this season was pretty non-descript. George Fox rumbled through the regular season but, in a year in which NWC observers said the conference was a little down, it was tough for some of us east coasters to determine exactly how good the Bruins were until the NCAA tournament began. Then they cruised by Chapman, rolled past Oglethorpe, handled Hope, took care of The College of New Jersey and withstood Washington U. in a run that touched most of Division III’s regions. And so George Fox becomes just the fifth program to win a Division III women’s national championship without a loss.

Given the make-up of the George Fox roster and their preseason placement (fifth in the NWC poll), the Bruins’ run was certainly unexpected. It’s even more unlikely if you consider where Kristen Shielee was entering the off season at this point last year. The quiet giant who anchored the stingy 2-3 zone defense and scored the biggest baskets of the year late in Saturday’s championship wasn’t even a lock to return for her senior season, as we learned in the retrospective posted below.

Other than returners Elise Kuenzi, BB Gardner and Lindsay Keener, the other contributors to the title team were also hidden in unknown places at this point last year. Sage Indendi, D3hoops.com Rookie of the Year, was playing high school ball in Livingston, Mont. and looking for a college home. She told us about her journey to Oregon and what she wants to do for an encore in the podcast below.

Is it too early to look ahead to next season since this one only ended a couple hours ago? If we do, we see a George Fox team that returns four starters, another exceptionally deep Hope team, and an Amherst squad with most of the big contributors back. And maybe somewhere out there, there’s a couple role players who are ready to take a much larger role, a couple high school seniors who haven’t even picked a college yet and a team that will have us scratching our heads with a smile on our face at this point next season.

More championship coverage:

Game story (Greg Chandler, MIAA)
D3hoops.com: Magicial run was not foretold
Holland (MI) Sentinel (Dan D’Addona): From cubs to champs - Young George Fox wins Division III national championship (with photo gallery)
Holland (MI) Sentinel (Alan Babbitt): Long, unlikely road for tournament MVP
The Oregonian (Lindsay Schnell): George Fox women win title, go undefeated
Photo gallery (The Oregonian)
St. Louis Post Dispatch (Alan Babbitt): Bears come up short in final
Holland (MI) Sentinel (Alan Babbitt): Hope defeated by best…again

More George Fox coverage:

D3hoops podcast: Rejector, Rookies, Rueck
Around the Nation: George Fox hunting again
Holland Sentinel (Alan Babbitt): Alaska family reels in some hoops