Sunday's Q and A article with Cal Lutheran president Chris Kimball focused primarily on CLU-specific athletic issues. But we also discussed some bigger-picture issues. Here is that part of the conversation.

In general, what do you think is maybe is the biggest issue Division III athletics faces right now?
Let me answer that in two parts.
From the perspective of the NCAA, the biggest issue they're facing is this combination of size and identity, or philosophy, if you will. And there have been conversations about dividing it, and so on. That's really got people's attention. But with the prospect, and I'm not sure how immediate, but the expectation is eventually NAIA schools will come into the NCAA, that you're just going to have an enormous number of schools that makes doing postseason very complicated. And the range of schools -- big, small, public, private -- it's difficult to say that we have a single approach to policies, rules, philosophy and so on. And the NCAA has really asked the presidents to get involved in a kind of identity reflection process over the next couple of years.
So I think from the NCAA perspective, that is the official big challenge.
Now I would add, I think the other big challenge is the one that goes beyond athletics and affects all public education -- maybe particularly private -- and that is how many high school students and their families will be able to go to college, whether they play sports or not.
I think that's a national challenge. We're facing it here in California and probably to a lesser extent around here. That's the real big game, but that's kind of a macro level answer.

Is the NCAA really the best organization for Division III schools? There are such disparate elements within that organization.
I have to say, I've been pretty impressed with how the NCAA is able to compartmentalize Division III, and I mean that in a good way. So you've got your own rule book, essentially your own meetings, and so on. You can read about the D-I and D-2 stuff, you go to the same receptiosn, but it doesn't have much of an impact on your day-to-day business, other than, frankly, to be able to go to Linfield and have the NCAA pay for that is due to the March Madness TV contract for D-I. So we benefit that way from it.
But I think they do a good job of identifying the interests of the members at each classification. It means it's an emormous bureaucracy, but it's broken into those three chunks. Division II, I think, is still struggling where it fits between I and III. But I'm comfortable in the NCAA, and think actually it's a reasonably good vehicle for talking about these identity and philosophy questions.

There have been, at times, kind of separatist movements.
Well, one of the SCIAC presidents has been a leader in maybe staying in the NCAA but creating a new Division IV. That may get revived again.

Well if the NAIA comes in, I can see there really being some structural changes because they don't fit Division II or Division III.
That's right. You could see some comfortably going into II, but others might come this way, and then what do they do with their scholarship athletes?
You know, NAIA's a real opportunity here because there's so many in Southern California relative to the NCAA schools, where again, the Midwest, Northeast, you've got so many NCAA schools that a few more don't make much difference. But for us, if you suddenly say you've got Westmont, Azusa, Point Loma, Cal Baptist in your mix, that changes things pretty dramatically. So I think that's going to be an important issue for us out here.
But as you say, it's going to raise that issue of how important are athletics in Division III, and does everybody play off the same book or not.
And back in Minnesota, one of the great complaints from the Minnesota conference, the MIAC, generally private liberal-arts colleges and universities, was that across the river in Wisconsin, you had a conference of the Whitewater, Stevens Point, all of which were 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 students, and almost like D-1 schools in terms of the resources and so forth. So where's the level playing field there? That's less pronounced out here, I think.

But it does become an issue when you go into the playoffs. I remember going to a Division III World Series one of the years Cal Lutheran went, and they were one of the smallest schools there, but there was a real disparity between -- about half the field was schools of 5,000 or less, and about half was 10,000 or more.
Well, you look at the football playoffs this last year. Linfield, which is about our size, was in the final four. Then you've got Wisconsin-Whitewater, a big state school. Mount Union, they're a special case. And I forget who the fourth one was. [Wesley, Del., which has 2,100 students, plus 400 on a satellite campus. Mount Union has 2,204 students; Wisconsin-Whitewater has an enrollment of 10,700.]
But there's a world of difference, just as an institution, from a Whitewater to a Linfield, or a Whitewater to a CLU. Linfield and CLU, you'd say, OK -- roughly the same size school and so on. That I get. That makes a lot of sense. When you add such different kinds of institutions, that's when you start saying, well, do we really have the same philosophy?

And looking at the Division III football championship, five years in a row now it's been Mount Union versus Whitewater in the final. Does that say there's a structural problem with Division III playoffs, that you're getting the same schools every year?
I'll say it's not desirable. Let's put it that way. And in both of those cases, there are some special things going on.
I could point to my old school, Augsburg, in wrestling, a much smaller sport. It was Augsburg and Wartburg one-two every year until this last year for at least a decade. You can say the same kind of thing there, that the haves continue to be the haves. And I think in football, there's such a buildup of resources that once a team is entrenched, it can be hard to dislodge them. I think that, for Whitewater and certainly Mount Union, people know, and they have an appeal to them.
So, desireable? No. Structural problem? I'm, not going to go that far. Certainly [we] would like to find a way to give them a year off or two years off by substituting for them in that championship.
But the question you ask is exactly the kind of thing being asked at the NCAA level. There are some schools, like a Williams or a Calvin College, outstanding liberal-arts colleges, that are good at a whole number of sports. They may not win every year, but they're going to be in that top 10, and that is seen probably as a better model than a school that just dominates in one thing.

Some of the answers in The Star's Sunday Q and A with Cal Lutheran president Chris Kimball had to be severely edited for length, depriving some of his comments of their full depth. Here are more expansive versions of three of those answers. In Part II of this blog post, we'll have questions that weren't included in the print article.

How comfortable are you with what athletics means at this university, and its place in this university?
I've been involved with Division III athletics now for, 15-20 years. I was at [Division III Augsburg College] before, and as a faculty member, I was the faculty athletic rep to the NCAA and to the conference. So I got involved that way, including in discussions about philosophy, identity, appropriateness of athletics and so on.
And then, as I became administrator there and here, have had athletics reporting to me. So it's always been kind of close to what I've done. And given a lot of chance to talk, both internally at the schools and to other folks, about what's the appropriate place of athletics, particularly in Division III.
And as you may know, there's been a lot of stuff written in the last decade about Division III. Bill Bowen did a book, a massive study, on what happened to athletes, particularly in liberal arts colleges, in school and then after their success and so on. And a lot of that stuff put meat to what people have thought anecdotally about the importance of athletics.
One of the things that I think is not well understood by folks outside ... is how important athletics are to a university or college of our size just from a numbers point of view.
A hundred football players -- and we've got that many in our program -- out of 2,000 undergraduates is a big chunk. A hundred football players in a Division I school of 50,000, you may never see one in the street.
And you add other programs to it -- baseball, we've got 50, 60 players at least trying out -- and you add it up, and we're like most of the smaller colleges and universities in the country where you're maybe going to have as much as 40 percent of your entering class coming in planning to play a sport. And overall, you probably have a third or more of your student body involved in intercollegiate athletics. And then you add those other key pieces of intermurals and recreation on top of that, and you have almost everybody involved. And I think that's a good mission fit for what we say: Body, mind, spirit. And to have all of those active for people, I think, is great.
And one of the things I've always liked, too, is a student doesn't have to focus on just one thing. If they come here to play a sport, they're also going to get a degree; they can be involved with extracurricular activities, as well. I'd say by the same token, if a student here wants to sing in our choir, they don't have to give up everything else just to focus on that. And I think that's the advantage, too, of a place our size. And I think here we've got things in about the right balance, if you will: The number of students that are scholar athletes, we recognize each year, for high academic achievement as well as athletic participation, keeps growing each year. I think our coaches continue to be on board with recruiting people that are serious about their studies and will finish, is real helpful, too.
And we're also having some decent success on the field and the court and in the pool, which is helpful, too.

How have you find found the difference to be between the SCIAC and the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference [which includes Augsburg]?
That's a really good question. That one's bigger. Not every school participates in every sport, but generally you're going to have 13 to 14 institutions in it. The SCIAC much smaller, and then not everybody [is] participating. So I always worry that if somebody leaves the SCIAC or doesn't participate, we could lose our automatic qualifier. So that's always a little source of concern. The SCIAC is looking back and forth on maybe expanding, and I think in general, I'm supporting that.
So MIAC is much bigger than SCIAC. More structure to it, I guess. A full-time executive director, and a full-time assistant director who also did the PR-marketing, kind of organized the SIDs. And the SCIAC, much less. What, just a year or two ago getting Lorin (Huffman) in as a director.
SCIAC is more restrictive in some of its rules around things like recruiting -- even than Minnesota, which was more restrictive than some of the other schools out there. So it's a little different environment out there -- I think probably not seen as important to the institutions as it was to Minnesota.

And are you comfortable with that? Because some of your coaches sometimes chaff a little that the conference downplays some of the things that could make them more competitive on a national stage.
Yeah, I understand what they're saying. I'm probably less concerned about that if it's done equitably across the conference. There are some things where I wish the conference were looser, because I think we are here to give students -- including student-athletes, not just student athletes, but including them -- opportunities. So I'd be more flexible about transfer rules and so forth, but not to the extent that I'm going to knock the walls down to change that.
The SCIAC doesn't get a lot of respect nationally in many of the sports, so you'l get the AQ and nothing else. The only way we're going to change that is to be more successful out of conference, which comes to some of the rules -- if they're different, that's a challenge -- but also the cost of the travel, et cetera.
So, for example, in football, I think we are poised, if we do things right, to be a real conference contender every year in SCIAC. We also know, if you're going to go anywhere in the tournament, it's going through Linfield. Maybe Willamette, maybe PLU [Pacific Lutheran].
And the way it works, no matter where the seeds are, we'll stay West. [Because of travel considerations, the SCIAC champion is almost always going to be paired with the entrant from the Northwest Conference. The only exception might be if the SCIAC were to get an at-large entrant, as well, which has yet to occur.] And until we get a good stadium of our own, which I'm hopefully we will in a couple years, but until then, it will be up there. So you kind of know, based on where we are, that this is going to be a path. And I think that's more of a challenge than some other conferences have. And, yeah, sure, I wish that were a little less the case.
But at the same time, there are a lot of folks, including a lot of student-athletes in Southern California -- not to mention a lot of our other recruitment areas, Phoenix and so forth -- so I think it's part of, we've got that bigger challenge of persuading people that an independent, private university can be the right choice academically as well as athletically.
That may be the other difference between Minnesota and here. There, I think Division III athletics are better understood, and better understood as a high quality. And here, it's kind of D-1 or nothing. I don't think there's as wide a sense that, yeah, if you play football at CLU, you play a pretty good brand of football. It's entertaining to watch; you've got some outstanding athletes.
I don't think that's as widely shared. And, by the same token, you've got many more people here that think public universities are the way to go, because California's had a history of great public higher education. In the Midwest, they've had good ones, but not the caliber of California, at least until issues.
So I think there are general market issues we have as challenges. And as we work at that, I expect us to be successful nationally, even within whatever confines the conference.

One of the unique things about the Cal Lutheran women's water polo team -- currently ranked No. 2 in Division III, and hosting No. 1 Occidental today at 5 p.m. -- is the number of top-level Division I programs on its schedule.
The Regals (14-12, 5-0 Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) played seven schools in the preseason top 20, including four of the current top eight -- UCLA, Cal, San Jose State and Arizona State.
"We always tease the basketball coaches," says CLU coach Craig Rond, "when we're playing the big girls, (saying) 'Well, it would be like you going and playing UCLA this afternoon. That's what we're going to do.' And they laugh."
That's not exactly the reaction of Rond's players.
"A lot of us thought our coach was crazy, initially," recalls junior Joy Cyprian, one of the CLU captains. "I was actually board when I looked at our schedule initially ... and I couldn't believe it. I didn't know what to say.
"Personally, it's really hard, because I never like playing a team that is really below our talent, because it makes me feel bad. ... And I even more so don't like being that team."
Not surprisingly, there's a method to the madness.
"It's another note I took from some of the more elite Division III schools," says Rond, recalling the birth of the program in 2004. "I started looking at who they were playing and said, 'Gosh, the top SCIAC schools, when you look at the early season, they all have kind of crummy records. But they're all playing really tough Division I and Division II schools to get ready for SCIAC."
This is feasible -- in a way it wouldn't be for, say, the CLU football or basketball teams -- for a couple of reasons. One is that, since women's water polo remains a relatively young sport, the gap between the programs, while significant, is not impossibly large. The other relates to the very nature of the sport.
"This is not football, where your playbook is 300 pages long," says Rond. "Water polo is a very fundamental-first sport. You can take a couple of pages from the national team, and there's not a whole lot of difference from what the 14-and-unders are trying to accomplish. ...
"There's not a lot of secrets. You know what's coming. And the difference between Division I and Division III, really in any sport but particularly for us, is size and speed. You know what it is you're trying to do, but you have a girl in there that's 6-foot-2, and you're trying to defend her at 5-foot-5."
Junior Meredith Butte, who played at Cal before transferring to CLU, notes one of the big differences between the levels is that the Division I programs essentially go year-round, while Division III water polo is basically a four-month undertaking.
"In regards to playing in the pool ... the way that Coach Rond runs his practice is very similar to a Division I school," says Butte. "He's implementing the same kinds of tactics, and intensity, and drills, and I think that's why we're so successful. We don't give ourselves the excuse, 'Oh, we're just a D-3 team."
So each side can understand what the other is doing, even if one is going to be able to do it at a very different level. Not surprisingly, CLU was 0-7 against those ranked teams, but the Regals still believe they benefited from the experience.
"Our schedule has been incredibly challenging," says Rond, "but we've done it with a pretty good balance. We'll go to a tournament, and there are two teams that we are just not even going to be able to compete with but can learn a lot from, and then balance that with the two teams that we can take what we learned against the big girls or big boys" -- CLU's men play Division I opponents, as well -- "and be successful against the Division IIs and Division IIIs."
Butte notes, "no one likes to go into games knowing that you probably don't have that great of a chance of winning. But if you kind of step back and look at the perspective of things ... you're literally getting to play Olympians. ...
"I think our first big D-I game was Cal, where I first went to school. And going in there, it's OK; maybe we're a little slow. And then next game, we played UCLA, and we picked it up a little more, and then we played Northridge, and picked it up a little more.
"It kind of forces the team to start reacting quicker and start playing on a D-I pace. And to tell you the truth, once we slowed the game down and played the way we know how to play, there really wasn't too much difference other than the speed and size of the girls. Tactically, I believe a lot of our players could probably match up fairly well."
Says Cyprian, "It's a huge learning experience. You don't learn how to play against someone who's 6-2 on your own team. ... But at the end of the day, it's supposed to be fun. And when you get to score -- I remember scoring against UCLA and I was very happy about that, that I was able to accomplish something. So when I see my teammates do that, you know, you realize that you really are doing something right, that our coaches are teaching us the right things."
And now that CLU is in the all-Division-III part of the schedule, the dividends are even more obvious.
"We heard it the other day they got out against a Division III opponent," notes assistant coach Matt Warshaw. "One of our girls said, 'Gosh, all those girls seem really small.' And we said, 'Well, yeah. You're used to playing the UCLA team. There's seven Olympians on that UCLA roster. So you basically played Team USA on Saturday, and then on Sunday, you played a Division III team and had a level playing ground."
The two teams: While the women's team has raced to prominence, the men's water polo program has had a more gradual climb. This year's 14-13 season was the first winning record for the six-year-old program, which reached the championship game of the SCIAC tournament before falling to Pomona-Pitzer 12-9.
In one respect, the men's program does not have the same opportunity for success as the women: Because of an insufficient number of programs, there's not a separate Division III championship.
"The man haven't had that one avenue," says Rond, "where maybe the can get a piece of the pay and put that ring on and say, look, we've accomplished something. ... They have to get it done at the Division I level."
But there are other reasons the men's program has grown more slowly, Rond says.
"Certainly, there were far more men's programs at the top," he says, noting the more established nature of men's water polo, "and trying to peck away at them has been a little tougher. And then, honestly, the guys were a little slower to come around to some of our philosophies. But I think they're starting to finally appreciate our philosophies, and what it is we're trying to teach. So they've been behind the women all the way."
But as both teams have grown, they've also grown in their support and respect for each other.
"We weren't very competitive," says Rond, "so neither one really had a desire to watch the other one compete. But now that the teams have these natural rivals in SCIAC, the guys like to see the girls beat those rivals, and the girls like to come out and see the guys beat those rivals. Because there's a little bad taste. There's blood. ...
"It's just coming of age this year, now that the women have been in a SCIAC championship game and had the bad taste of an awful one-goal loss. They want to see the guys get revenge for them. And the guys have now been in the SCIAC championship game and have the bad taste of a three-goal loss, and they want to see the women get revenge for them.
"And it's been fun to see all that, because that is also part of the master plan, to have these two groups really just respect each other. ... And I think they do, finally."

Digging into the numbers from CLU's 16-7 win over Chapman:
Tough to score against: If you're thinking CLU has never played defense quite like it's playing right now, you're almost right.
Saturday's win over Chapman marked the third time this year that CLU has held an opponent to seven points. The Kingsmen have not had three such games in a season since moving to NCAA Division III in 1991. Nor, as a Division III program, have they had a five-game stretch in which they held opponents to 14 points or less, as is the case during their current five-game win streak.
To find comparable accomplishments, you have to go well back in the CLU record book. The last time CLU had three games allowing seven points or less in a single season was back in 1985, when a 6-5 campaign included a 28-7 win over Sonoma State, a 34-7 defeat of Western New Mexico, and a 24-3 defeat of St. Mary's. The last time the Kingsmen did it more than three times was in 1982, when the Kingsmen had three shutouts and a 21-7 win over Humboldt State. That team started the season 5-0, and allowed just 32 points in those wins to better the 48 points allowed in the current streak.
Still, since the first game in 1982 was a 34-16 win over Occidental, you have go go back another year to match, and better, the five straight games allowing 14 points or less.
The 1981 Kingsmen, who started 0-2, won their last eight games and never allowed more than 14 points in the process, giving up a total of just 65 points during the streak.
So CLU has played defense like this before. But it's been decades.
Tough to move against: The 139 yards allowed was not a CLU record -- the Kingsmen allowed just 26 yards to Caltech back on Oct. 30, 1965 -- but it is a fairly rare accomplishment. Football box scores are available on CLU's athletic website, clusports.com, back as far as the 2001 season, and Saturday's total equaled the low figure in the 69 games for which yardage stats are available. (The Kingsmen also allowed just 139 yards in beating Menlo 54-0 on Oct. 8, 2005).
Put another way, CLU has held opponents to less than 200 yards three times this season (Pacific Lutheran finished with 186 yards and Whittier had 192). In the previous seven seasons, CLU held opponents under 200 yards just five times, and never did it more than once in a season.
Tough to reach the end zone: Saturday's game was the second time this season CLU has won 16-7 -- the Kingsmen did it earlier against Pacific Lutheran -- but such low-scoring games have been a rarity during CLU's SCIAC era. In fact, since joining the SCIAC in 1992, CLU has only played in six lower scoring games: a 10-9 win over Azusa Pacific and a 14-3 defeat of Whittier in the first two games of the 1993 season; a 9-0 loss to Pomona-Pitzer in 1995, a 10-6 win over Chapman in 1996, a 6-0 overtime win over Occidental in 2002, and a 14-7 loss to Willamette last year.

Some odds and ends from CLU's 44-13 win over Pomona-Pitzer this afternoon:

A bit more from CLU's 44-13 win over Pomona-Pitzer in CLU's homecoming game at Mount Clef Stadium:

-- CLU's first six plays were a 22-yard pass from Jericho Toilolo to Jesse Matlock, a 10-yard run by Antoine Adams, a 46-yard pass from Toilolo to Matlock (for CLU's first touchdown), an 11-yard run by Danny Hernandez (who lined up at quarterback), a 13-yard run by Hernandez (who took a pitch and eluded at least three would-be tacklers behind the line of scrimmage) and a 13-yard run by Matlock. That's six plays, six first downs and 115 total yards. Not a bad start.
"It's hard to explain," said coach Ben McEnroe, "but there's definitely a feeling you get when you get on a roll offensively, and just feel like, from a play-calling perspective ... everything you call is going to work.
"There's a lot to be said about momentum. We have some big-play capabilities on the field, and Jericho does a good job managing it."
That early run was one of two occasions when Hernandez lined up at quarterback. He called those opportunities an "adrenaline rush." McEnroe said the Kingsmen would continue to showcase that look on occasion.
"He threw his first incompletion in practice this week," said the coach. "In that package we've got a couple of throws."
There was actually a pass called for Hernandez on Saturday, but he tucked the ball in and ran.
"He made a smart play," said McEnroe. "We would like to use that guy in a lot of different ways. He's a dual threat back there at quarterback, which is more than some of the schools that run these kinds of packages can say."
-- Toilolo had a very efficient day, completing 18 of 27 passes for 278 yards and running for another 26 yards.
"He seemed really comfortable today," said McEnroe. "Made some nice plays with his feet, made some nice plays with his arm and his head. He's just a smart guy. He managed a nice game."
It's hard to remember, given the impact Toilolo had last season before being sidelined by broken ribs and a punctured lung, that he still is relatively inexperienced as a collegiate quarterback. As McEnroe noted, this was just Toilolo's eighth collegiate start. The Kingsmen are 6-2 in those games.
-- CLU was flagged for 12 penalties, including two that gave Pomona-Pitzer first downs inside the 5-yard line on the Sagehens' first scoring drive. One of those, a celebration call after CLU broke up a pass into the end zone, left McEnroe more than a bit irked.
"I was a little disappointed with some of the penalties," he said. "Obviously, we don't have any control over that other than showing our kids on film and addressing it. Whether it was a good or bad call is irrelevant. We need to get some of those things straightened out, because in a closer game, it might come back to bite us."
-- CLU is now 12-7 all time against Pomona-Pitzer, 7-3 in SCIAC competition. Since the infamous (to CLU) 9-0 loss to the Sagehens in 1995 -- also known as The Game That Cost Joe Harper His Job -- the Kingsmen are 5-1 against Pomona.