For many Washington University sports fans, the lack of visible national coverage of Division III sports can be frustrating. While Wednesday night’s regular season matchup between Duke and the University of North Carolina received more attention from national media outlets than any other game that night, the Division III national championship between Wash. U. and Amherst last spring went uncovered by many, though it did air nationally on CSTV. The game did not even receive its own highlight on ESPN’s Sports Center. Instead, it appeared as one of that night’s Top Ten Highlights, coupled with the Division III women’s championship game.

“It’s embarrassing to me that ESPN did that with the national championship game,” senior Adam Handler said. “I understand that D-III sports aren’t going to receive the same attention as D-I, but it’s upsetting to me that my friends at other schools didn’t even know we won the championship.”

Filling the void of national coverage for many Bears fans and fans of other Division III schools over the last several years has been D3hoops.com, part of the D3sports.com network. It is perhaps best known for its Top 25 poll, which is used by the NCAA to rank teams nationally the same way the NCAA uses the Associated Press (AP) poll to rank Division I teams. D3hoops.com began as Division III Basketball Online in January 1995 when it was started by Centennial Conference commissioner Steve Ulrich.

In November 1997, Pat Coleman, former sports information director at Catholic University, took over the site. Coleman, too, was frustrated with the lack of national coverage of Division III and saw the site as a way to give recognition to the Division III student-athletes he felt deserved it.

Coleman perhaps underestimated how many people felt the same way. He initially saw the site as a side project, but soon found there was enough interest nationwide in Division III basketball to require far more work than expected.

“I figured I would work on the site a couple of hours a night, two or three days a week,” Coleman said. “Then I found out pretty quickly that there were a lot of people following Division III basketball…so it kind of went from grand plans of we’ll do it maybe 8-10 hours a week into this sprawling thing that includes football, baseball, soccer, forums and a job board and takes about 40-60 hours a week of my time during the season, plus a couple of volunteers who put in 15-25 hours a week as well.”

The site was renamed D3hoops.com in the summer of 1999 to coincide with Coleman’s launch of a partner football site, D3football.com, and since he made a greater commitment to it, traffic has grown rapidly.

With its daily game wrap-ups, season previews, standings, national columns and awards selections, the site has become the go-to place for Division III basketball fans.

“I use D3hoops.com to keep track of how Wash. U. does in its road games, as well as to put Wash. U.’s success in perspective and to see how other schools do across the country,” senior Mike Goldfarb said. “The great thing about D3hoops is it centralizes everything so that you can get information on records, scores and some analysis all in one place, as opposed to having to go look for it in a bunch of different sources.”

D3hoops.com has also expanded in recent years to include podcasts about Division III basketball and Insider blogs written by players. For the past two years, Wash. U. senior point guard Sean Wallis has blogged for the site. Wallis believes the site’s importance for Division III basketball is immeasurable.

“I don’t know if you can really put into words how important the site is for Division III basketball,” Wallis said. “D3hoops really allows it to be a smaller country with regards to Division III basketball, and the guys just do an incredible job running the site and make it so [Division III] has more of a big-time feel and make it a little more important on the national level.”

Also immensely important for the site is the message board. But while the message board sparks debates about who is the best D-III player of all-time and allows fans to create conference pick ’em leagues, Coleman believes it has had an unexpected impact on D-III basketball that may be even bigger than the site itself.

“The message board has really become the community of Division III,” Coleman said. “In the past you have maybe two fan bases on either side of the gymnasium shouting at each other across the 50 feet of [hardwood], and they never mingle, at least not in a positive way. Now fans know each other, they’ve met on the message boards, they’ve exchanged e-mail off the board, they exchange messages on the board, they get together, they hang out before the game, they hang out after the game…and I think that’s brought Division III fans closer together around the whole concept of Division III rather than just necessarily their teams.”

For many of those fans, the next step is convincing others that that concept deserves to be recognized across the nation.