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📕 Today in the D3Playbook. How Sweep It Is For Springfield Men’s Volleyball. Can Men’s Volleyball Save American Colleges From Financial Doom? SCORE Act Is A Losing Proposition.

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For the sixth time in program history and first since 2017, Springfield is the Division III men’s volleyball champion.

After sweeping Cal Lutheran on Thursday, the Pride did the same to Carthage in the national final, winning 29-27, 25-21, 25-16.

Senior setter Dylan Mulvaney was named the tournament’s Most Valuable Player.

“For a certain type of college in the United States, the news is rarely uplifting.

These aren’t the state universities with huge research budgets and perks like Bama Rush and lazy river pools. And they aren’t the elite “Ivy Plus” private colleges with miniscule acceptance rates and greased pipelines to McKinsey.

They’re the majority of four-year nonprofit colleges and universities in the US, a mix of small private and regional public institutions whose problems are existential.”

» Court Awareness. “There’s only a finite number of 18-year-olds out there,” says Laurel Bongiorno, the incoming president of Hartwick College, a private liberal arts school of ~1.1k in Oneonta, New York. “So the question is, how do we get them to choose [us]?” Hartwick has slashed tuition and added new majors to punch up an enrollment base that’s declined ~30% since the early 2010s. This year, it launched a secret weapon: a men’s volleyball team.”

» By The Numbers. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, while participation in football (-5% ) and baseball (-3%) are down over the past 10 years and basketball is holding steady, participation in boys’ volleyball has increased 76%.

» Between The Lines. “There were 45 men’s volleyball teams at the Division II level and 144 at the Division III level this year, up from 24 and 77 in 2018, respectively. These Division II and Division III schools, which tend to be small private or regional public schools, are most threatened by enrollment woes. As their traditional enrollment bases dry up, sports have become a life raft.”

» Worth Noting. “A couple years ago, Steve Dittmore, a dean at the University of North Florida, got curious about whether athletes — “a way to ensure tuition dollars are coming in” during turbulent times — could be too much of a good thing. He identified 44% as a key threshold after noticing that colleges like Birmingham-Southern, Finlandia, Clarks Summit, and Wells had student bodies with around that percentage of athletes and were shutting down.”

“College sports can open the doors of opportunity for student-athletes. All too often, exploitation is what steps through the opening.

The SCORE Act and President Trump’s April 2026 executive order to “Save College Sports” would transfer billions in wealth from student-athletes to coaches and institutions, grant the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) unprecedented control over college athletics, and deny athletes the right to fair representation, while leaving smaller sports programs and institutions — including Title IX programs and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) — behind.”

» Situational Awareness. “Both the SCORE Act and President Trump’s April 2026 executive order are fundamentally flawed. Their efforts represent a transfer of wealth from student-athletes to institutions and coaches who already benefit disproportionately from the lopsided system. The SCORE Act, for example, caps revenue sharing for athletes at 22%, while top coaches earn more than $10 million annually. Not surprisingly, President Trump’s executive order does nothing to address this disparity or expand opportunities for fair compensation.”

» Driving The News. “Rather than acknowledging the NCAA’s mistreatment of student-athletes or pursuing reforms in compliance with the nation’s longstanding antitrust laws and recent court cases, the SCORE Act instead seeks to grant the NCAA an unprecedented antitrust exemption — insulating it from accountability and entrenching a system that extracts billions from athletes while denying them a commensurate share of the value they produce.”

» Football. John Carroll WR Tyren Montgomery was not selected by a team in the seven-round NFL draft but did sign as an undrafted free agent with the Tennessee Titans. UW-River Falls QB Kaleb Blaha accepted an invitation to try out at the New Orleans Saints three-day minicamp.

» Water Polo. Pomona-Pitzer captured the USA Water Polo National Division III women’s championship with a 15-10 triumph over archrival Claremont-M-S. Brienz Lang scored four goals for the Sagehens.

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