By Pat Coleman
D3sports.com

D3hoops.com is the third of our major sites to get the PrestoSports makeover, a site redesign which is long, long overdue. With tipoff coming in less than two weeks, the circa 2000 look of D3hoops.com is now history.

Here's what is new, aside from the design:

Around the Nation
Evans Clinchy's job on the Boston Celtics beat for NESN became too much work for him to continue as our weekly columnist. However, we've gotten another frequent contributor to take over Around the Nation: Marcus Fitzsimmons. A writer for The Daily Times in Maryville, Tenn., Marcus has tracked the national scene in Division III basketball for several years and also writes for Kickoff on D3football.com.

What we're reading
On the front page you'll see a box with the latest Division III basketball stories we've seen in newspapers across the country. If you have something for us to see, use our feedback form to pass the link along! We also have added those stories to team pages, so readers visiting pages for Ohio Athletic Conference teams will see stories we've tagged about OAC basketball, and the like.

PrestoSports is already the trusted home of athletics web sites at all levels, from Butler and Kent State down to high schools, with hundreds of Division III clients and more joining the network every year. (We see you there, Centennial Conference, Denison, Swarthmore, Wooster.) We've already run our game day data through them for years and now their site design is on par with the rest of the Division III market.

D3baseball.com will also get a similar makeover. D3soccer.com's new design rolled out last week. D3sports.com will turn from being a placeholder site with one story and a bunch of links into a place where can also give some coverage to sports such as lacrosse, track, softball, cross country and other sports not involving dribbling or hardwood.

I hope you will find everything you expect on our new site. Some of the archives are not yet brought over, but that process will continue. When I met with Presto this spring to discuss design, I told them the only thing we needed to keep was the logo, that which you see at the top of this page. From a look and feel perspective, nothing else was sacred. But we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge one last time, the design that Calvin fan Martin Wondergem sent us out of the blue one day which ended up defining D3hoops.com for a decade.

And this is what we have, finally, a modern news site worthy of the fine student-athletes and great sport that we cover.

If you have questions, please drop us an email at info@d3sports.com or use our feedback form.