Quote from: Caz Bombers on May 27, 2026, 03:19:54 PMthe music part of Fredonia's cuts is surprising, that's one of their top programs. A friend of mine growing up went to Fredonia to study music and he's now a music teacher in our hometown school district.

I'm surprised, too. One of my best friends from high school specifically went to Fredonia in order to study music, and it was the music teachers at our high school that steered him there.

I saw this Forbes list on Instagram yesterday. Ruined my day, but I pored over it, anyway. I didn't see too many schools mentioned that surprised me, but there were a few:

* Coe: A well-regarded academic institution of ancient vintage that's located in a state that's always bragged about its residents having the highest percentage of college grads in the nation.

* Loras: See above. Maybe not the same institutional cachet as Coe, but a steady stream of suburban Chicagoland kids have bolstered Loras's student body in recent decades, as Loras has appeared to do a really nice job of maximizing its relative proximity to the heartland's biggest population center.

* East Texas Baptist: People have been moving in massive numbers to Texas over the past couple of decades like there's been a land rush on. If there are any schools that one would think would be impervious to demographic decline, it'd be schools located in the Lone Star State. But ETBU doesn't seem to have built up much of an endowment over the years,  despite the fact that it's been around for a long time (founded 1912). A mile and a half south of of the ETBU campus on the city of Marshall's west side is NAIA member Wiley University. Wiley is on the Forbes list, too, which I can understand because it's a tiny and perpetually impoverished HBCU. But I didn't expect to see ETBU on it alongside its neighbor.

The other Texas school on the list, Concordia (TX), kind of makes sense in terms of being institutionally vulnerable, because it, too, has a modest endowment, plus it also has compounded the ongoing collective struggle of all of the member schools of the Concordia University System of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod by openly trying to secede from it, giving rise to the sort of institutional legal headaches that put an additional burden on a school's health.

Adrian: This school pioneered the "expand the sports menu" approach to solidifying admissions numbers among D3 private schools. Look at the absolutely mind-boggling number of sports offered by Adrian, and you realize just how all-in Adrian has been for that particular admissions model. But I guess that there still aren't enough Bulldogs to pay all of the bills.

Alvernia: I'm not surprised to see Alvernia on this list. I'm surprised that Alvernia is still open. I figured that, at the very least, it would be just above Keystone on the impending-extinction end of the Forbes fiscal-illness ratings.

Fingers crossed for every single school on this list. I hate, hate, hate to see a school close its doors for good.

First he plucks former Augie standout Jake Willems from the portal. Now he's swiped a key Carthage recruit. Chris Martin's stealth campaign to make life easier for his alma mater's basketball program while bolstering his own program at Loras continues apace.

Quote from: scottiedoug on May 20, 2026, 04:03:40 PMThe elimination of sociology as a major puts BW right in line with DeSantis' campaign to eliminate fields in Florida where students might learn how social forces work. And who needs to know how capitalism works?  I am glad I am not trying to run a college these days!

Baldwin Wallace is located in Ohio, not in Florida.

A decade and a half ago there was a heavily-recruited 6'9" high school senior who announced on social media that he was going to play basketball for Augustana because it had a great medical school. He apparently meant that he'd heard that it had a great pre-med major, or that Augie biology majors had a good track record for doing well on the MCAT and getting into med school, but on the CCIW board we had loads of fun with his declaration. (As it turned out, he left the Augie basketball team halfway through his career there, and he ended up graduating from Augustana with a B.A. in communications.)

His enthusiasm about Augustana's medical school is the first thing I thought of when I read the words "Archer Daniels Midland School of Dentistry at Coe College," because back then we joked about the "John Deere School of Medicine at Augustana College."

Quote from: Ralph Turner on May 15, 2026, 03:22:48 PMI believe that Centenary LA has done a respectful job in D3 since leaving D1 15 years ago. Centenary's best sport has been baseball. They have made the baseball playoffs in 2018, 2022, 2024 and 2025 since coming to D3 in 2012. Birmingham Southern made the right choice when it moved down (regardless of its administration and Board.)

Centenary's kind of what I have in mind when I consider what might be an expected path from scholarship sports to D3. The Gents and Ladies have had modest success across the board at this level, with baseball being the standout program (baseball's always a good bet for a Southern school in a division in which 80-90% of the teams can't practice outdoors before March because of the weather). But it did take the Gents six years to go from transitioning from D1 to D3 before they made that first foray into the D3 tourney.

Hartford's not the only school that has had to deal with irate and disaffected alumni when that school jettisoned athletic scholarships and went D3. I remember the attempts by Centenary alumni to pay for D1 sports out of their own pockets for a period of time as a last-ditch effort to forestall the move, and the anger expressed when the school said, "No, thank you, we're going through with this move, anyway."

Reviving a football program a couple of years ago that had been terminated decades earlier certainly helped in this regard, given that it's football-crazed Louisiana we're talking about, especially since the Gents football coaching staff has worked very hard to bring in local players from the northwestern part of the state. Louisianians will forgive almost anything if you put a winning football team in front of them!

Quote from: KnightSlappy on May 15, 2026, 10:57:51 AM

Quote from: Jake Feldman on May 14, 2026, 02:11:07 PMIF we had most of the D2 schools move down to D3, that may necessitate a split to maintain competitive balance in the division.

My baseline assumption is programs coming to D3 from 'higher' levels will struggle for a while as they adjust to turning over their roster and recruiting without scholarships to offer.

This. It's not as though Hartford, for example, is burning up the track since it left D1 and joined the D3 ranks. Same with Centenary. I don't expect St. Francis (PA) to do so, either.

Quote from: Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan) on May 15, 2026, 11:25:35 AMI'm curious, though, if that would happen were a whole conference to come at once?  You can still have rivalries and a conference tournament.  You're not eligible for championships, but it's a much easier sell to recruits - still something to play for.

It's an interesting thought experiment, because you're talking about a roughly equal playing field as far as intraconference competition is concerned. Even if you have an existing imbalance within the NE-10 on the D2 level, everyone starts off at square one as you slough off the scholarship players. But does the scramble over acquiring D3-level players negate the ability of the now-D3 NE-10 programs to adjust well, given that they may be canceling each other out in terms of this learning curve by going after a lot of the same players? I don't know, because I don't know enough about New England recruiting to have a bead on that question. But I wouldn't expect any of them to outdo what Hartford's done thus far.

Kira Mowen has as high-powered a résumé as I've ever seen among CCIW women's basketball coaches. She's been a head coach at the D2 and D3 levels -- and she won a MWC title and MWC tourney title (and thus made it to the D3 tourney) as the head coach at Knox, which is not an easy place to win -- and an assistant at four different D1 schools. On the face of it, at least, hiring her appears to be a genuine coup for North Park. Kudos to North Park AD John Born for this hire!

I'm very excited to see what she can do with the program ... although I'm very guarded about NPU's prospects for success in the upcoming season, considering the roster she's inheriting and the fact that all she can do at this late date in the recruiting cycle to bolster the 2026-27 roster is to locate and recruit either an as-yet-uncommitted juco player or players or perhaps an unclaimed portal refugee or two.

Every coach ought to get a mulligan for their first season. Given her late hire and the current condition of the NPU women's basketball program, I think she deserves at least two seasons at Foster and Kedzie before there should be any sense of rising expectations placed upon the program.

Quote from: IC798891 on May 14, 2026, 03:56:49 PM

Quote from: WUPHF on May 14, 2026, 11:25:45 AMFlo College did publish a greatest sports dynasties story last week, so they are doing things.  Limited things.

It seems strange that Johns Hopkins lacrosse and St. Thomas football made the list by the way


And Calvin volleyball?

https://www.flocollege.com/articles/15882801-the-greatest-d3-sports-dynasties-ever

Apologies to the writer for what I'm about to say, but it's clear that little actual research was put into the list, and they just picked whatever they came across first

Kenyon men's swimming and diving won 31 straight titles. Women's swimming won 17 straight. That's the ultimate standard in any Division, for any sport. Neither even got honorable mention. Neither did Augsburg wrestling and their 15 titles

North Central is a veritable Walnut & Bronze factory in the running sports. The Cardinals have won 19 men's cross-country titles, 6 men's indoor t&f titles, 6 men's outdoor t&f titles, and 7 women's triathlon titles, all under the tutelage of the late Al Carius and the coaches he trained and then hired. And that's not counting all of NCC's individual titles that are awarded in the running sports.

North Central didn't get mentioned, either.

Quote from: jmcozenlaw on May 13, 2026, 06:34:20 PMMy friends at SNHU are quite nervous about the future of the conference (and D2 as a whole), as is Franklin Pierce. I don't think that there would be room for all of these schools if they decide to make the move to D3, unless to form a separate conference.

I think there will be plenty of room for them. Unfortunately, small schools seem to be dropping like flies in New England, so my guess is that the existing conferences (aside from the NESCAC) will be willing to take on more members to act as insurance policies against further shrinkage by closure attrition.

Quote from: jmcozenlaw on May 13, 2026, 06:34:20 PMI'm not sure if anybody here follows the PSAC in PA (Kutztown has built a national football powerhouse) but there are very quiet conversations taking place about most, if not all of the schools, making the D2 to D3 move. This would be very interesting........PA's version of the WIAC (where many of the schools have larger enrollments and larger/nice facilities than most schools in the PSAC).

History would be repeating itself, then, because a bunch of PSAC schools were in D3 back in the division's early days. For example, Lock Haven won the D3 men's soccer national title in 1977 and 1978. Slippery Rock was in the D3 football playoffs in 1974 and Millersville was in it in 1979. Mansfield was in the D3 men's basketball tourney in 1975 and 1976 and Slippery Rock was in it in 1978; and Mansfield was in the D3 baseball tourney in 1976, 1979, and 1980. It wasn't until 1980 that the league's members voted to put the entire league under the D2 umbrella.

Aside from the two Lock Haven titles in soccer (which was a club sport on most college campuses back in those days; there were only 16 teams in the D3 soccer tourneys of the late '70s) and a hoops regional won by Mansfield in '75, none of the PSAC reps in those early-era D3 postseason competitions had much success.

Quote from: Jake Feldman on May 14, 2026, 02:11:07 PMIF we had most of the D2 schools move down to D3, that may necessitate a split to maintain competitive balance in the division.

To which I gently reply, "What competitive balance?" Have you ever looked at the Learfield Directors' Cup standings, perchance? The Directors' Cup is a measurement of all-sports athletics success at each of the three NCAA levels of intercollegiate competition, plus the NAIA and each of the three juco levels. Points are awarded for appearances in the national tournaments and meets of various sports, with point totals increasing the deeper that a team gets in its national tournament or meet.

Check it out sometime. It's not a 100% perfect indicator of across-the-board success in D3 athletics, but it's by far the best measuring stick we have.

It is always dominated by the same handful of D3 schools. Always. The three leagues that perennially produce the most successful schools are the UAA, the NESCAC, and the WIAC -- and their members make up the bulk of those two-to-three dozen schools that have the most all-sports D3 postseason success every school year. You'll see the occasional Centennial or CCIW or OAC or ODAC or MIAA or MIAC school represented as well in that mix of schools, but even there it's always the same schools within those leagues.

So, again, what "competitive balance" is there to maintain? This is a division of haves and have-nots, sports-wise, no different than D1 in that regard. That isn't going to change, no matter who comes in or out of the division.

D3 is a melange of 400+ institutions: private, public; richer than Croesus, poorer than a churchmouse; large, small; zealous and all-in for athletics success, institutionally indifferent to athletics success; academically elite, academically meh; ideally located, geographically isolated; generally broad student constituency, narrowly-tailored or missionally-restrictive student constituency; etc., etc. It is inevitable that such a vast array of institutions that are collectively unalike in all but one way -- none of them give out athletic scholarships -- will have inherent competitive imbalances on the field or in the arena or on the track.

The influx of a handful of D2 schools might alter which schools populate the elite end of the bell curve of competitiveness within D3. Then again, it might not. But, either way, it won't change the bell curve itself one bit.

Quote from: kenoshamark on May 12, 2026, 08:14:28 PMDefinitely a tough loss for Carthage especially with all the other starters that graduated.  The one mistake in the press release is stating he was a two time first team all conference player.  He was second team as a sophomore. 

Also, Riley is a high volume shooter..will be interesting if he has that kind of freedom at the D1 level.  He took almost 80 more shots than both the Johnson brothers and 21% of the total shots for Carthage last year.

Wish him well too...Carthage needs a huge recruiting/transfer class to complete.  Not much play from any underclassmen last year. Hard to gauge who can make a difference since none of the freshmen or sophomores got any true minutes.

Ryan Johnson, Chris Schlesinger, and Jabe Haith are the only returning Firebirds who played more than a hundred varsity minutes in 2025-26. In fact, all of the other players put together who are eligible to return totaled about 30 collective minutes with the varsity, all of them in garbage time. As you said, either Steve D. is going to have to bring in a passel of immediate impact newbies, or last year's Carthage JV team will be counted upon to show dramatic across-the-board development this off-season.

I admit that to me it seems kind of odd for an institution that maintains a sabbath-rest mandate against playing sports on a Sunday to host a logistically enormous and labor-intensive activity like a commencement ceremony on a Sunday ... but I can see the practical utility of it in ensuring that spring student-athletes graduate alongside their classmates.

Quote from: Flying Dutch Fan on May 11, 2026, 09:30:30 AMPulling this back up since the weekend saw a bit of a coming out from the midwest in lacrosse as unranked Hope (now 20-0) beat Ithaca 14-11, and then Bates 14-12 - both games at Bates. Marks the first time any team from the MIAA has reached the quarter finals.  The Hope roster (42 total) is 81% Michigan natives (more than 50% of the roster is from wihtin an hour drive of Hope), with the rest a mix from IL, CO, IN, OH, Wa, and CA.

Interesting note: Following that Saturday game (was a 7pm start time) Hope had to quickly fly home so that the 12 Seniors could graduate at 3pm the next day - STUDENT athletes!!

Yes, interesting. It does appear that midwestern lacrosse is slowly but surely beginning to make national inroads.

Your postscript about sports and graduation raises an interesting and timely issue, FDF. It's been a tradition at North Park for decades to hold a separate graduation ceremony for senior student-athletes in spring sports whose teams have qualified for postseason tournaments or meets that will take place on Commencement Saturday. It's always held on the Tuesday of Commencement Week in the small and intimate Isaacson Chapel in Nyvall Hall, the seminary building on North Park's campus. It's usually a function that serves North Park baseball teams that have qualified for the CCIW baseball tournament, although sometimes (as happened this year) the softball team also qualifies for their CCIW tourney and thus has its seniors receive their diplomas in the Tuesday graduation ceremony in Isaacson as well. The tradition used to be that the baseball players would wear their North Park baseball caps in lieu of the usual flat-topped and tasseled mortarboard graduation caps, but this year they abandoned that tradition and went with the standard mortarboards, probably because it's becoming increasingly popular in America for graduating college students to decorate and personalize their mortarboards and the NPU baseball players wanted to do that as well.

Given that CCIW schools generally run similar school-year calendars, my guess is that other schools in the conference likewise provide similar auxiliary commencements for their seniors who are spring student-athletes with competition conflicts on Commencement Saturday. And since the CCIW doesn't operate in a vacuum, I'm also guessing that there are other D3 schools across the country that do this. Which schools hold separate commencements for their graduating senior student-athletes who are playing postseason sports in May, and which schools follow Hope's pattern and will move heaven and earth to get their seniors back on campus in time for commencement? And are there any schools that simply tell their seniors, "Sorry, but even though you're on the school's team, if you're going to be playing sports on graduation day you're gonna have to receive your diploma in the mail"?