“What was travel like in the UAA?”
Pretty cool, although it’s a bit different as a football player than basketball player for two reasons. One, only four of the UAA schools have football teams: CMU, WashU, Chicago, and Case Western. Rochester also has a football team, but they play in the Liberty League, presumably because they felt it was a better geographic fit and the league has an automatic bid to the playoffs, which the UAA does not have because so few of the schools have a football team.
Two, football players will travel for one game on Saturday, so our typical schedule for a road game that required a flight was to depart on Friday morning, have a walk-through practice Friday afternoon at the field, play the game on Saturday, stay over on Saturday night (we’re lucky in this regard; not all schools would pay for us to stay in the hotel an extra night, when you consider the cost of 65-70 hotel rooms for the traveling party - players, coaches, trainers, team doctor, SID, AD - plus the meal allowance, that’s probably an extra $10,000 or more on the school), and then fly home on Sunday.
UAA basketball guys would travel for a Friday night game followed by a Sunday afternoon game. I think, although I’m not certain, the typical schedule was for them to fly out Friday morning, play game #1 on Friday night, stay over, travel on Saturday, stay in city #2 on Saturday night, play on Sunday afternoon, come home Sunday night. So it would be a bit more hectic with two roadies in one weekend.
As a football guy, it was still pretty cool. I played games in Chicago (UChi), St. Louis (WashU), Cleveland (Case Western), Colorado (Colorado College, which sadly has since dropped their program; that was a really cool trip, campus was stunning), rural West Virginia (Bethany), upstate New York (Hobart and Rochester), Virginia (Randolph-Macon), Maryland (Johns Hopkins) and a slew of PA schools.
“I’d like to stay involved in D3, and one of my career goals is to be a head coach at this level…”
Hey, that’s awesome man. It can be a tough road but if that’s the goal, go for it. You know how it goes: you’ll start off as a GA and just have to work your way up from there. If that’s what you love, it won’t seem like “work” - for me, as much as I loved the game, I was ready to walk away and be “just a guy” for once.
“I am going to have a master’s in professional writing in 2 years, so I may take the journalism route and would love to write about the D3 game.”
Congrats on starting your Master’s degree. Good luck!
“People have so many misconceptions about division three sports…”
LOL. Preaching to the choir here, my man. I think more people “get it” than you might expect, but there are a fair amount of people that say things like “I didn’t even know CMU had a football team!” or that think we were some kind of club team. It’s funny to explain “Yeah, we’re like, a real team with uniforms and everything! We have coaches, and practices, and we play games…”
Hypothetical Question: Would you guys beat a good high school team?
Short Answer: Yes. By about 50.
Long Answer: My college team had about 110 guys on it at any given time. Of those, 105 started for their high school teams, probably 90 were multi-year starters and/or all-conference players, probably 40 received some sort of all-state recognition, and at least a dozen were borderline Division I players that either got injured and lost their offers or chose “playing time and sanity in Division III over four years of scout-team beatings at a MAC school.” Every kid that started - every single kid - was one of the 2-3 best players on their high school team. Now, we’re all 1-4 years older than we were in high school, and we are all bigger, stronger, and faster, plus we have gotten better at the game by competing against other bigger, stronger, and faster guys. Do I think we would beat a high school team? Yes. We would obliterate a high school team.
It’s like the idiots who think Alabama’s football team would beat the Jaguars, or that a D1 basketball team would have beaten the Sixers this year. I always want to say “Maybe a third of that college team will play in the NFL/NBA. Now, think about this. EVERY SINGLE GUY on that NFL/NBA team has made it to the NFL/NBA.”
