On a more pessimistic note, this place may not just be dying, but already dead.  Very minimal activity, during two big days of soccer, now 3-4 weeks into the season.  Maybe a few of us keep frantically trying to defibrillate the patient well past any meaningful chance of a revival.  There has been the suggestion that traffic and interest would increase if some of the more active posters like myself took up less space and grabbed some pine.  I don't think that is it, but certainly anything is worth trying at this juncture.  The medium in part may be just too anachronistic, but I don't know of other options where posters can react and respond and a whole community of lurkers and posters can see the content and jump in or not. 

3-4 weeks in and we haven't heard a single word about D3soccer.com.  We knew last year was the last year for incumbent owners, but we literally have not seen anything about the status of ownership, why there hasn't been a transfer, and why a site can't be created with D3soccer.com or something very similar updated to the 2020s that includes a good message board platform.

You may have neard crickets because there is no transfer. Who wants to take this on? I can't imagine the site traffic and advertising covered the costs.

Quote from: jknezek on September 22, 2023, 09:36:29 pm

4 turnovers and an inability to move the ball through the air at all according to the stats. yikes. Anyone know what the travel arrangements were?

QB1 injured very early, tried to play a few series but had no lower body support, QB 2 not ready for prime time, QB 3 not ready for any time.

Unfortunately injuries are part of the game. Endicott is a good team. Either a lot better than I expected or Hardin-Simmons is not as good as I thought. Probably both to be fair...

Endicott is playing inspired football. They are leading 24-3 with 6:58 in the 3rd Q.

Good thing I'm not a betting man, I'd have lost a lot on this game.

Btw, this a question for some of the old-timers (and anyone)...and please chime in if you think this is hyperbolic and/or unfair.

Tufts was not better than Messiah in 2014...very, very good and that day good enough but 2012-2014 Messiah had just fantastic teams who I would guess could have finished mid-table or better in the Patriot League.  Tufts scored like in the first minute.  Messiah cleared a ball to only outside the 18 where Tufts legend and midfield maestro, Jason Kayne, one-timed a half-volley top shelf.  Messiah threw the kitchen sink at Tufts but could not break through to score.  Messiah fans will point out that the match was played on Muhlenberg's infamous turf.

So the question...was that game/moment program-altering (and even D3 landscape-altering) for either, both, or none.  I don't think it takes a lot of hyperbole to say all three. 

Tufts experienced the feeling of being a champion (barely, barely got a bid that year too), and went on to win three more in a four year period (a feat only Messiah had matched or exceeded at least in the past 25 years).  Not saying Tufts didn't have great players and they obviously has a brilliant coach, but I think winning that game changed the Jumbo culture, just like with Messiah, winning every single year became the expectation.

Messiah has won only once title since that game when at worst they probably were supposed to win every other year.  The next year of 2015 Amherst won.  Then Tufts won again in 2016.  Messiah won in 2017...a year when I think Tufts got knocked out of Bello Field by Brandeis in double OT that at least most of Tufts Nation considered fluky.  Then back to Tufts for 2018 and 2019.  And after Covid year, Conn Coll and Chicago have claimed titles.  We at least currently are in a new era where there isn't an almost automatic endorsement of Messiah vs The Field.

In truth, I doubt Messiah has changed much at all, but maybe has forced Falcon Nation to calibrate things a little differently.

And certainly the overall landscape still has its favorites every year, but the sense that you don't have to be Messiah (or Tufts) to win a title imo has really opened things up.

I think this is a long answer with a lot of factors.

For my money I think the "elite tier" of D3 soccer has just gotten broader and flatter, while the second tier has gotten so much larger. Messiah in the 00s and early teens was constantly in the top tier, but that top tier, the teams that could legitimately win a title, was maybe a cast of 4 or 5 schools that rotated, but Messiah was always there. By the start of the teens, I think that tier had expanded to 8 teams, with 4 or 5 being there regularly, or at least spending a considerable number of years in a row there. Now I think that tier is closer to 12, with 4 or 5 that are there consistently and then a rotating group.

As that group expands, and frankly the second tier gets deeper in quality, the odds of "upsets" increases, especially in a low scoring game like soccer that is not really the best for single-elimination tournaments. I don't think you are ever going to see another run like Messiah from 2000-2014. 10/14 championships in an NCAA style tournament is a dominance that I don't think, the way talent is evaluated and dispersed now, will ever be repeated.

Personally, any team that can win 2 titles in 5 years, with other years being Elite 8 or better, is probably a dynasty. I find Tufts run of 4 in 6 years to be almost comically against the odds these days. I can see teams winning back to back again, you get that special group of players and they win as mostly juniors and again as seniors. But beyond that? There is so much talent available, and so many more schools with the ability to find it.

I suspect Messiah will remain among the elites, but I suspect a championship every 5 years, maybe a repeat once in every 10 years, is going to be a darn good mark for D3 dynasties.

Now, why do I think this is true? Because the players across the country are so much better. My home town soccer club in NJ was founded in 1976. Those kids, from that very first year of inexperienced dads inspired by the NASL, went to college in the late 80s, early 90s. It was one of 4 clubs in two counties. I started playing in 1983 at 5 years old, and the league had grown to 12 clubs, and I promise you, every one of our coaches still had no idea what soccer was. The refs were all immigrants, and tactics were non-existent. My dad was watching VHS "learn to coach soccer" tapes in 1985, and he was still watching them while coaching me in 1994, just going up in age.

We had no clue how to play soccer and, except for the 1994 World Cup it wasn't on TV. I remember my dad hiring a soccer "tutor" for several members of our team when I was about 10, all the parents chipped in. It was a 70 year old Italian guy we couldn't understand who spent an hour with us and told us we couldn't beat 7 year olds in "the old country" and we weren't playing soccer, just kickball, and he wasn't able to coach such incompetence. We were runner-up NJ State Champs at the time.

When I went to W&L, class of 2000, it wasn't the tactics that kept me on the bench, they were no better than what I had picked up playing select and at various summer camps and in h.s., it was the athleticism. I had a good "soccer mind" for the time, having watched as many videos as my dad, but I couldn't kick and run with the college crowd. And I guarantee almost no one in D3 was looking for David Beckham, they were looking for Cobi Jones.

Contrast that to today, where the local club where I live now, required completion of all the U.S. Soccer grassroots classes to coach a 5 year old rec league team. In Alabama! A state where soccer is still often considered a communist plot. You want to coach an entry level travel team? D license. You want to coach a select travel team? C License. Every travel coach is paid, they share at least two teams in season, often 3, with assistants that coach away games.

In other words, these kids playing today have learned to play soccer. Maybe not as well as the rest of the world, with their academy systems that cover huge swathes of the country while ours covers a few urban areas, but they have learned more by 10 about "football" than I ever learned about "soccer". And the ones playing D3 aren't just the kids that made a h.s. team and could run. The recruiting process is different, the newer coaches are different, the pool is bigger, and schools like Messiah, with their wonderful recruiting niches, can get players they never dreamed of 20 years ago, but so can so many other schools.

I expect it will continue to get harder, and I suspect more and different schools will push through to the Elite 8. Not just because tournament soccer can be fluky, but because the barriers to good players have fallen and more and more good coaches grow up from the generations after mine that actually learned how to play football.

And one more post just because I'm having fun today.

W&L, all-time, is 547-550-39. The Generals are 3 games away from .500. That might not seem like a big deal, but it is. The last time W&L was .500 over it's history, was more than 50 years ago, in 1971 when they were 295-295-35. At one point, in the early to mid-2000s, W&L was 43 games below .500. So in the last 20 years, roughly, we have been +40. I'm really hoping to see the Generals break that .500 mark for all time.

So what changed? Well, we started playing more option, eventually going almost all option. I know some people hate the option. Hate watching it, hate playing against it. But running the option has given W&L a big boost, especially in ODAC play. It allows W&L to recruit athletes differently, and it has been a smart choice.

For many years W&L failed at trying to be better by going strength on strength. It hardly worked. Being better by being different... that has been a different story. Will it get W&L to the top of D3? I very much doubt it. At some point, teams have the athletes to simply smother the option. It's also challenging to win the first game of the season, or a game where a team is coming off a bye, as they get extra practice against the scheme. But for most weeks of the season, it has proven an advantage.

Sometimes the Generals capitalize on it, almost 40x more than they haven't over the last 20yrs. Sometimes either the other teams smother it or the playmakers just aren't there for a year or two. But overall, I enjoy W&L being different, and I certainly have enjoyed the winning that has come with it.

Just a quick thought on a different topic. Coach Favret retiring from H-SC after the season.

Mixed feelings here. Coach Favret is an amazing coach. As an offensive coordinator at Catholic he helped take them to heights they have yet to revisit. He almost immediately turned around a moribund H-SC team and turned them into an ODAC power. Many of his offenses in the mid-naughts through early teens were juggernauts. He deserves every accolade H-SC, the ODAC, Virginia Writers and more have bestowed on him.

But since the mid-teens, it's been more of a struggle. How much of that has to do with outside factors I'll never know. But changing over coaches, provided they can bring in the right one, might reinvigorate the program, or narrow the challenges that shifted H-SC's path since 2014.

Interestingly, it leaves Coach Arruza at R-MC as the lone ODAC coach of a school's most recent "glory days". R-MC seems, of course, still well in the midst of theirs. But Coach Clarke was gone from Bridgewater after the '20 season, Coach Abell left W&L after '17 for Davidson, and now Coach Favret is leaving. That leaves only W&L's Coach LeRose (1-2021), other than Coach Arruza (4 and counting, but not counting the COVID season, sorry), as active coaches with an ODAC title. The last time someone besides Favret, Arruza, Clarke, Abell or LeRose won a conference title was 2006, W&L's Coach Mirriello. Before that you have to go back to 2000 and E&H's legendary Coach Wacker.

It has been a changing of the guard for the ODAC, we will see how the newer coaches stack up. So far Coach LeRose has one title and Coach Lemn was knocking on the door last year after a rebuilding in 2021.

Perhaps whoever takes on the difficult task of following Coach Favret will set the ODAC up to be an even bigger brawl week in and out.

On another note, I find the customer base here interesting.  Most schools don't have anyone posting about them or on their behalf.  And those that do are usually limited to one or two who post regularly and "hang out" on the site a ton.  So when any of us are "the one" how did that come to be?  It's actually a tiny, tiny percentage of parents of teams and fans/alums who post here.  I assume many lurk without registering.  And it's so weird to see names online literally almost all day and night with no posts or very infrequently.  What are we all doing?  Hitting refresh over and over to see if there's a new post in a thread?  Obviously, I'm not criticizing, I mean how could I, but the dynamics of the self-selection process of who are here a lot are GenerallyInteresting to me haha.  There definitely is an intense addictive aspect (at least for me).

I think, like most message boards, it's a bit intimidating. Maybe I'm a parent so I follow my kid's team, and maybe know a little bit about the conference. But how does that stack up to this conversation? Not real well. You could be a parent of an AMCC team, or a NAC team, maybe CUNYAC and, honestly, you realize that no one talks about those schools until the playoffs role around and we briefly mention how we think the champion is a sacrificial lamb. Well, 90% of D3 teams get little or no airtime on these boards except the occasional sacrificial lamb comment because they are, essentially, irrelevant. Even in the CC, a solid top to bottom conference, if you are a parent of half or more of the teams, what is there to say?

I am somewhat surprised we don't get more parents from the consistently quality teams, or recent grads. But message boards are... old school. I'm not sure how many people search for them or really care. You keep in touch with your community, the parents, your fellow alums, on Twitter (uggh, X) or maybe Facebook, but do you really want to come on here and get into the discussion? Very few do.

Now do they sometimes watch the discussion? Sure. I suspect lots peak in when their team, or their kid's team, is doing well. Just to see what's being said. But feeling like you have something to add takes 1) some serious self-confidence (sometimes arrogance) or 2) an axe to grind a bit. I think one of my very first posts, if not my first, which was on the football boards, was monumentally stupid and Pat Coleman quite rightly called me on it.

These boards, especially football, have been shrinking since I joined 15 years ago. Posters leave and are hardly ever replaced. I thank Pat Coleman for keeping the lights on. He may not visit these soccer boards much, but he's very active in football and basketball (maybe other areas, but I don't visit those real often). He's been great for D3 and I hope that somehow we can find a way to reinvigorate this community.

I kind of wondered if taking up a fund to do some advertising on D3 school athletic websites might help for the whole D3sports.com family. Clearly too late for D3soccer.com, which hasn't been a true part of that family for a while, but I feel like something needs to be done.