Calvin alumni and brothers Zac and Matt Snyder are working to bring recognition and attention to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)’s Division III (DIII) athletics with their YouTube show and Twitter platform D3 Datacast.

Beginnings

The Snyder brothers grew up as sports fans, and when they got to Calvin, their love for men’s basketball grew. In 2005, during Zac’s junior year and Matt’s freshman year, Calvin Men’s Basketball made it pretty far in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Most of the regional tournament games were within driving distance from Calvin, allowing fans to follow and watch the team survive and advance through the rounds. When the team made it to the NCAA DIII Final Four, the Snyders traveled to Salem, VA to support them.

“It was really fun for us to follow the team at the national level and the whole process of seeing them play those national games and then go to the Final Four … [This] made us realize how fun it is to follow the entire DIII men’s basketball landscape,” Zac said.

Finding a Division III basketball community 

Basketball is on people’s minds this time of year, but the attention is mostly on teams like Duke, Gonzaga and Kentucky making appearances on ESPN and Sports Center. Division III basketball is a bit more niche; the audiences are smaller, and the community around DIII basketball is tightknit. Zac and Matt wanted to get involved in the conversation, but social media was not used for community dialogue yet, so message boards on D3hoops and blogging were their main source of community around DIII basketball. 

“For Division III there is not a big media entity, so it just takes people deciding to do something in support of Division III,” Matt said. 

D3 Datacast 

The Snyder brothers graduated from Calvin with engineering degrees; statistics and numbers come easily to them. Around 2008, they started making spreadsheets that calculated multiple DIII men’s basketball team’s winning percentages, game statistics and analytics and started to compare Division III teams across the country. They posted their data on their blog site for a while and tweeted about it every so often.

“We both had the mindset of not just being sports fans but doing something with it,” Zac said. In the summer of 2022, Zac and Matt started thinking about a YouTube show where they could talk to each other about DIII men’s basketball and the data that they had calculated. “Let’s just turn on the cameras, record something that maybe other people would be interested in as well and continue the DIII conversation … Because there are not large media entities covering this stuff, maybe we can start talking about it,” Matt said. “We’re not scouts. We’re not coaches. We didn’t play [basketball], so maybe we can contribute more on [the] data side of things.”  

D3 Datacast is a D3hoops show with 32 episodes on YouTube. On the show, Zac and Matt talk about basketball teams to watch, regional and national rankings and their data analyses. 

This past weekend at the DIII Final Four and Championship in Fort Wayne, IN, the Snyders attended for the first time as credentialed media personnel.