Nobody cares about Division III sports.

At least that’s what people say. The athletes aren’t as good. The competitions aren’t as exciting. People have never even heard of our schools.

There are a couple things that DIII athletes don’t have:

First, we don’t have athletic scholarships. There isn’t any money involved at all. In fact, it’s against NCAA Division III rules for an athlete to accept any scholarship money.

Second, we don’t get fame or glory. Hardly any of us will ever compete at the professional level. Our competitions aren’t broadcasted on TV. In fact, the only people who attend our meets, games, and matches are coaching staff, family, friends and classmates. Our names aren’t household names, except in our own households. We don’t have 70K followers on Instagram. There are no young athletes out there who think “I want to be a DIII athlete someday.” And if we’re being honest, we never thought that ourselves when we were little kids.

So, why? Why do we go to practice every day and work our butts off? Why do we play a sport for a school that isn’t giving us any money to do so? Why do we spend hours a day trying to get better, or spend our weekends out of town at a competition when we have plenty of homework we could be doing instead? We aren’t getting any direct benefits, so why are we playing a sport that “nobody cares about”?

For me and other DIII athletes, there is only one reason why we choose to compete at the college level. Maybe I wasn’t good enough to compete in DI or even DII athletics, but I love my sport. As DIII athletes, the only reason we play is for the love of the game. Through all the years of injuries, coaches that yelled, people that doubted us, we stuck with it. We were never the kids who wowed the crowds and maybe most of us never got the MVP award, but we had more heart than anyone else on the team.

So maybe there’s no scholarships, and maybe there is no fame or glory. But what is there is something way more special: athletes who wake up at 6 am to get their morning run in before their 8 a.m. class, athletes who practice twice a day, athletes who have learned how to balance their time between their sport and classes, athletes who work over the summer or even during the school year to help pay for school, athletes who get injured but still don’t give up, athletes who put in the work over the summer, even though they have no mandatory training camp to attend. These are the types of athletes that I know, and I am proud to call these people teammates and competitors.

So when people say that nobody cares about DIII athletics, the truth is, I don’t care. We don’t do this sport because anyone cares. We are all in it for one reason: because at some point in our lives, we found a place where we belonged, where we could have fun, do something we love, and make ourselves stronger, faster, and better. We love who we are when we play sports, and we don’t care if anybody else cares.