Division III Starts Wednesday: Hopkins Host Denison, Washington and Lee Head to York
Wednesday is first-round day in Division III, and the headline tie is a good one. Johns Hopkins host Denison at Homewood Field in Baltimore, 4pm ET, and both sides arrive as conference champions in serious form.
Hopkins are ranked ninth in the country at 16-4. They won the Centennial Conference title 3-0 over Swarthmore on Saturday, and this is their eighth straight NCAA trip, their 14th overall. They’ve hosted an NCAA game at Homewood for four straight years now. They know how this works.
Denison might be the more dangerous side, though. The Big Red are 16-2, North Coast Athletic Conference champions, and they’ve won 16 games in a row. Sixteen. They haven’t lost since September. This is the third meeting between the two programmes and the first in the NCAA tournament, so there’s no recent history to settle it. Something has to give: Hopkins’ home record in the postseason, or Denison’s winning streak.
Washington and Lee’s road test
The other big first-round tie on Wednesday sends Washington and Lee to York, Pennsylvania, for a 4pm ET start against York College. Both teams are nationally ranked and both won their conferences on Saturday.
Washington and Lee are 14-4 and ranked 19th. They won their fifth ODAC championship with a 2-0 shutout of top-seeded Lynchburg, avenging a 3-2 overtime loss to the same side in late October. They’re back in the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2022, and they’ve won 10 of their last 11.
York are 16-4 and ranked 14th. They won the MAC Commonwealth title 2-1 over Stevenson and they’re on a seven-game winning streak. Two ranked conference champions, both hot, playing for a place in the second round on Saturday in Newport News, Virginia. That’s exactly what the first round should look like.
The Bowdoin regional
There’s a second local angle in the same half of the bracket. Stevenson, ranked fifth at 17-2, host Colby-Sawyer, 18-2, on Wednesday at 4pm ET. The winner meets the Hopkins-Denison winner on Saturday at top-ranked Tufts, who have a bye into the second round after their perfect 18-0 season.
Elsewhere on Wednesday, Endicott (16-4) travel to Amherst (9-7), Bridgewater State (13-7) visit Williams (11-6), and Rhodes (14-1) go to Rowan (17-4). Those three ties feed the regional hosted by Bowdoin in Brunswick, Maine, where the Polar Bears are hosting an NCAA regional for the first time since 2015. Second-round games there are over the weekend, with the third round on Sunday.
For viewers in Pakistan, the 4pm ET starts mean a 2:00am PKT start on Thursday morning. The semifinals are Friday 20 November and the championship is Sunday 22 November, both in Geneva, New York.
For our money, Hopkins against Denison is the tie of the round. A 16-game winning streak against a team that simply doesn’t lose NCAA games at home. One of those runs ends on Wednesday night.
