Happy Anniversary – D3VBWest

Happy anniversary to D3VBWest as it celebrates its first year in existence! It was 1-year ago today that I published my first post and this little website was born. You can find that first post here, but suffice to say it rivals “The Great Gatsby” and “Pride and Prejudice” as some of the greatest works ever written.

On this historic day, maybe a little story on the history of D3VBWest. I was still working at my real job but thinking of retirement more each day (I lasted until the end of September). My daughter’s college career was over and we were approaching the 2017 season and this would be my first volleyball season in a long time without her games to attend. Now, I make it a practice to adopt (non-financially) every Southwestern player I can so they won’t look at me strange when I attend games, but I was still going to miss volleyball…a lot. So, in mid-July 2017 I started kicking around the idea of a website devoted to the best region in DIII volleyball. There were a lot of failures as I played around with different (free) software and different (free) hosting services. I ended up circling back to WordPress, which is the same hosting site that Ricky Nelson uses. On July 25, 2017 I posted two articles followed by two more the next day. I was emailing Ricky about something on the 26^th and mentioned I was trying to start this website. I was still unsure if I could stay with it an entire season but I wanted Ricky to see it and let me know where it stunk. Well, the next thing I know he’s posted about it and linked to the site. It was at that point that I knew I was “stuck” with the website for at least a season. There have been a lot of misses/mistakes as I muddled through the year but I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve been shocked that there are so many other DIII volleyball nuts like myself out there, but it shows you there is a need out there for this type of content. As a gift to the site, I encourage everyone to send me lots of money. Failing that, please let your parents/coaches of your DIII team know that this site exists.

Some random website stats for the last year:

• There were 203 posts for the year (doesn’t include this one).
• The posts consist of over 100,000 words.
• The most popular post over the last year was “Regional Host Sites – Early Discussion”. (This seems really strange to me.)
• The most popular page (left side menu item) was “Watch List”. (I will be doing this again for 2018.)
• Most page views occurred during November 2017 (Championship month).
• Overall, there have been over 22,000 views on the website.
• Most views ever for a day occurred on November 5, 2017. (Posted the projected NCAA field, thoughts on selection and thoughts on the west region host site.)
• Outside of the USA, the site is most popular with Canada. Although I do appreciate that one of my Latvian hackers visited the site.

My most fun post of the year was “Selection Eve – Thoughts” because I basically was just updating the page with my thoughts as I watched a number of championship matches being streamed. I then detailed my thoughts as I mimicked the NCAA Selection Committee. My favorite posts of the year were “DIII Beach Volleyball” and “DIII – JV Programs” because the topics were of interest to me and so many coaches wanted to talk about those subjects.

My biggest failure of the year was my attempt at writing an article about the behind the scenes effort of creating a DIII volleyball schedule. I’m working with a coach on this but summer has gotten in the way (or I just annoyed him too much). Regardless, I had about 500 words written unsaved on my laptop before I realized the document was gone. (Maybe I now know why that Latvian hacker visited the site that one day.)

Anyway, thanks to everyone for visiting the site. It has been a joy, and I can’t wait for the 2018 season to start!