Fan sites offer D-II, D-III fans a way to stay involved

What does it take to be successful at the Division II and III levels? In this four-part series, ESPN.com looks at the role of money, recruiting and fan sites at the lower levels.

Brandon Misener faced a problem familiar to many a Web surfer in the mid-'90s: He was scouring the Internet in search of information and having little luck finding it. Long before "Googled" became an official verb and at a time when "blogs" easily could be confused with a moving Jell-O-like mass in a bad horror movie, Misener was having trouble locating Web sites devoted to his obsession: Division II college football. At the time a recent graduate of Division II football powerhouse Northwest Missouri State, Misener decided to cut short his fruitless search and start a Web site of his own. Soon, d2football.com was born.

"It was a situation where I'd just graduated college, and I guess I was more Internet savvy than most," says Misener. "There was nothing there, so I figured it was put up or shut up. Something needed to be done."

With d2football.com, Misener has done it. Equipped with a stable of knowledgeable columnists to cover each conference, links to statistics and top 25 polls, interactive message boards and live chat rooms, the site has taken off since Misener created it. Now, Division II football fans can satisfy their cravings for in-depth reporting and analysis of their beloved sport with only a few clicks of the mouse. And d2football.com is not the only Web site devoted to lower-division NCAA sports.

For Division III sports fanatics, there's D3football.com, D3hoops.com and D3baseball.com, all published by the fledgling D3sports.com. D3hoops.com came first, launching in 1997, and soon was followed by D3football.com in 1999. Last January, D3baseball.com was introduced. The number of hits D3football.com has received to date is more than 21 million; D3hoops.com is close behind with more than 17 million visitors.

"Traffic lately is about six to eight times [more] on average compared to what it was in 1999," says D3football.com and D3hoops.com editor and publisher Pat Coleman, who founded Division III Basketball Online before converting it to D3hoops.com and added D3football.com several years later. "What I do know is that our sites have become a gathering place for Division III fans to meet and mingle with fans from other schools. Fans of opposing teams now meet and tailgate together before heading to opposite sidelines at kickoff, having come to know each other on our message boards. And we've been around long enough that an incoming freshman playing football this fall would have been a third grader the last season that D3football.com wasn't around. It's a part of the Division III sports landscape."

Similarly, Misener's d2football.com is a part of the Division II landscape.

"It's grown faster than I thought it would," he says. "It proved the demand was out there. The Internet is the perfect tool for anything sub-Division I."

Catering primarily to current and former students of Division II and III schools, Web sites like Misener's and Coleman's tap in to a niche audience who grew up watching or playing sports at schools you would never see on television. "Naturally people without connections to a [D-II or D-III] school are going to gravitate to the highest level," reasons Misener. But Coleman believes some Web surfers might visit his Division III sites for different reasons.

"I think we draw in some fans who enjoy the highest level of amateur athletics," says Coleman. "With no scholarships, these student-athletes are getting no benefits by playing Division III sports. This is where the love of the game is at its highest." He concedes, however, that the overwhelming majority of D3sports.com visitors are "people who are attending or have attended Division III schools, their parents, or people who live in the towns of the schools we cover."

Regardless of where their visitors come from, Division II and III Web sites are gaining in popularity. On February 25 this year, D3hoops.com recorded a single-day high of more than 74,000 hits. In 2003-04, the site would gain 1 million visitors about every six months. It took less than three months for D3hoops.com to go from the 16 million-visitor milestone to 17 million earlier this year despite much of that time coming during the offseason.

Misener says d2football.com has seen a similar jump, going from approximately one million visitors a year initially to three million a year now. These days, Misener insists that anything less than 25,000 hits per day during the season is a disappointment. "One of our goals when we started was to make Division II more of a national presence. When a student graduates from Grand Valley State [in Michigan] they might start going to Michigan games. We wanted to make Division II seem important enough that they would still go to Grand Valley State games in addition."

Thanks to the success sites like d2football.com and D3hoops.com have been experiencing over the last decade, other sports are following suit. While D3sports.com currently only offers links to D3hoops.com, D3football.com and the recently launched D3baseball.com, Coleman hopes the site eventually will include a weekly column devoted to D-III soccer, hockey and lacrosse.

A message board on D3sports.com poses the question, "What Division III sport should we add a board for?" The answers vary -- field hockey, soccer, softball, lacrosse, track and field, volleyball, wrestling -- but two crooked numbers accompanying the thread are more revealing than any of the responses: 346 replies, 34,531 views. And as any sports fan knows, the numbers don't lie.

Chris Preston is a staff writer for the Shelburne News and a frequent contributor to Varsity Magazine. He can be reached at ChrisPreston@shelburnenews.com.

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