It's so rare to find all three of us in one place, but at the D3hoops.com Classic, we are all needed. That's Patrick Coleman, Gordon Mann and Dave McHugh broadcasting a Classic game in Las Vegas from 2019. d3photography.com photos by Larry Radloff, Steve Frommell

By D3hoops.com

We don't like to talk about ourselves. 

Our aim in publishing and managing D3hoops.com over the past 26 and a half years is to talk about you. You the NCAA Division III basketball student-athletes. You the Division III basketball coaches. You the administrators, and yes, even you the fans. 

But it is nice to be appreciated. And that's what the National Association of Basketball Coaches announced today, in recognizing D3hoops.com with the Cliff Wells Appreciation Award. Here's how the NABC release puts it:

For nearly three decades, the digital media outlet D3hoops.com has provided unrivaled coverage of NCAA Division III basketball, elevating the national visibility of small college athletes and coaches across the country. Through commentary, rankings, awards, podcasts, live game broadcasts and other content, D3hoops.com has firmly established itself as the predominant resource for followers of Division III basketball. The outlet – managed by the team of Pat Coleman, Gordon Mann, and Dave McHugh – has also collaborated with the NABC on various enhancements to the annual NABC-Reese’s Division III All-Star Game.

We do manage the publication, and we do so with a lot of behind-the-scenes help from Ryan Scott as well. Dave McHugh is a very public face of Division III basketball on Hoopsville and selection shows and national semifinals broadcasts, while Patrick manages the operations and freelance writers, and he and Gordon handle a ton of data and written words more behind the scenes and Ryan handles a bunch of scores on game night, the Team of the Week awards and his more public-facing Around the Nation column. Gordon specifically leads our women's basketball coverage, and leads the entire site during the Division III football playoffs.

And of course, none of this would have ever been possible without the help of College Sports Communicators over the decades, especially the ones who embraced us immediately when we first hit the internet in our current form at the end of November 1997. D3sports.com and team have been formally recognized by College Sports Communicators (formerly CoSIDA), the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and the City of Salem over the years for our contributions to Division III athletics. And our original team of Patrick Coleman, Ray Martel, Jim Stout and Mark Simon helped carry us through the first number of years, as did great support from the City of Salem.

But all we want to do is make Division III basketball (and football, and baseball) better -- a more enjoyable experience for the fans, make sure it's run to the best of its ability for the student-athletes and coaches, and get the names of schools and participants out there. And these days, we are not the only ones putting out Division III basketball stories, data and commentary, and that's great. The more the merrier.

Thank you for the recognition.

Please keep visiting the site. And Patrick will keep exclaiming to Dave.