From Fandom to Influence
In 2005, the Calvin’s men’s basketball team reached the Final Four of the NCAA tournament, sparking excitement across campus. Among those captivated by the team’s success were students and brothers Matt Snyder ’08 and Zac Snyder ’06. Their enthusiasm soon extended beyond Calvin’s own Fieldhouse and inspired a deeper dive into Division III (DIII) teams nationwide.
Beginning by simply contributing to a blog, Matt and Zac dove deeper into the logistical aspects of DIII basketball teams’ statistics and analytics. They have since grown their special interest into a podcast and YouTube channel focusing specifically on DIII basketball teams, the projected outlooks for the season, and recaps of the larger games. With the launch of this larger platform and the corresponding growth in their audience’s interest, D3 Datacast came to life.
But their channel doesn’t just reach fans; it has also reached DIII teams and coaches across the country, who started contacting the brothers to gain insight about how to schedule their seasons based on the data Matt and Zac compiled. This has grown especially with the insight the brothers have gained into the NCAA Power Index (NPI), a tool introduced in 2024 that is designed to determine which DIII teams will qualify for the national tournament.
“I’ve been surprised by how many coaches and assistant coaches from other programs end up following [us],” Matt says. “Our reputation was that we were among the first to figure out how [NPI] would be calculated. We had a lot of interested parties of coaches and fans watching our episodes of how that would be calculated.”
Matt and Zac both received engineering degrees from Calvin, so the statistical mindset is second nature to them. They enjoy using D3 Datacast as a way to stay connected with each other and to have another venture outside of their full-time jobs as engineers.
“We think Division III basketball is a little bit of a hidden gem,” Zac says. “It’s fun to be out there doing our show on social media helping to highlight some of the great basketball that’s being played and help connect fans.”