what is a d3 college baseball season like?

I would think it's not much different than D1/D2/NAIA/JuCo.  When my son was at a JuCo they scheduled 56 games in the spring with most played on weekends - doubleheader on Saturday and a single game during the week.  Averaged 4-5 games during a week.  If the weekend away games were far enough away it was usually an overnight stay.  Maybe two nights if over 5-6 hours traveling time.  In those cases they would travel Friday afternoon/evening then play Saturday/Sunday and return to the college Sunday night.  Travel was via the school bus in all those cases.

 

Pretty much the same for the D2 he transferred to.   The D2 had 50 games on the schedule.  Only time they flew was for the D2 tournament which was over 500 miles away - NCAA paid for hotel/travel/food expenses since the site of the tournament was over 500 miles from the school.

 

The local D3 school had only 45 games or so on their schedule.  To my knowledge they traveled via team bus for all their away games.

From what I've gathered from son's friends playing D3 they have shorter season and shorter bus rides. They're more likely to have weekend doubleheaders than miss Friday classes all the time.

D3's are limited in the number of games they are allowed to play.

Check out schedules from schools in different parts of the country. d3baseball.com is a great resource for that.

Warmer weather schools can play games earlier in the year. Many cold weather schools won't start until spring break in March. And then the conference season is really compressed into 4-5 weeks.

Teams can stay at hotels. Teams can and do fly. But budgets at D3 are much lower so flying may only be on a spring trip (or not at all).

D3 plays 35 gamea plus post season. Itbis really depenent on the school. There are two schools in my sons old conference, NCAC, that play all their non coference games on their spring trip. Those trips last 2 weeks for these schools. Once they get back the do not play again until conference games start. Conference games in the NCAC, are a 7-9 DH Sat and Sunday. OWU usually played one or two diring the week and then coference games on the weekend. OWU always did their best to getball the games allowed played. If early season games get cancelled, the late season could have quite a few games a week, by the end of the season. Other teams not so much. One of the leagues in NY/pa sometime only play 20 some games due to weather. One year I saw a school that only played 13. 

As all things D3 it ismhighly variable. Research historic schedules of the scools you are interested in. 

I think D3 is allowed 40 regular season games, plus league playoffs and regionals and world series.  A team that goes all the way to the world series can end up playing 50+ games I think.  Trinity ended up playing 54 games -- which is, I think, the number of regular season games a D1 school can play. 

 

I think not all D3's play the maximum allowed of 40 games. 

 

Seems to me that there is a big difference between D3's in cold climes and D3's in warm climes.  (Probably true at all levels).  Cold climate schools start playing actual games  later.  Almost a month later in some cases.  Plus they get lots of snow-outs/rain-outs, etc.  So they end up playing in many seasons, at least when the weather doesn't cooperate,  a very compressed schedule with many games in a relatively short time.

 

I guess there is one advantage to that for the cold weather schools.   The warm weather schools don't have to develop as much pitching and so don't have has many arms that they can rely on come play-off time -- when games schedules are really compressed and you need a lot of reliable arms if you are to compete.    If the weather  never forces you to bunch your games together, you probably just go with your top guys more regularly.  

 

Anyway, one reason that my son decided to stay West rather than go to a cold weather school that he actually liked quite a lot was that it seemed that reconciling baseball and academics would actually be more of a challenging because of the often compressed nature of cold weather schedules. 

 

I believe 40 games for D3 is correct... It's 50 for D2 (at least from my experience).

 

D3 schools generally don't have a "large budget" so flying to games, staying in hotels, etc. is not the norm. For "northern" schools, generally some "southern" trip to FL or SC is set up. For our school, the cost of that trip was paid for by the parent (or at least part of it).  Schedule depends largely on how coach sets it up and the conference.  For Centennial - conference schedule has 2 midweek games and 1 Sat doubleheader (both 9's).  The midweeks are games against schools 60-90 minutes away. Weekend games were the longer "day trip".

 

Using http://www.d3baseball.com/ it's very easy to look up a particular school and/or conference to determine their schedule history. 

The D3 season can be strenuous for sure. It's just of much of a grind as it is at the D1/D2 level. D3 teams are allowed to schedule 40 regular season games. The D3 school I attended was in the south so our schedule was different than a lot of other D3 schools. The vast majority of D3 schools are north of the Mason-Dixon line and because of the weather their schedule is much more condensed. Schools in the north typically go somewhere (florida or arizona) for spring break and play 10 games or so to start of their schedule. When they return the weather is usually good enough to start playing outside. I know some conferences will have their teams play 4 games a weekend with 2 7 inning double headers.

 

We were fortunute to spread our games out a little bit more. We would have a mid week game on Tuesday and then a 3 game series on the weekend, usually being a double header Saturday and a single game Sunday. Because there aren't as many teams in the south our bus rides were pretty dang far. Most of our bus rides were 5-6 hours but we had a couple each year that were 9-11 hours. We never flew but I know of some schools (Trinity University) that did occasionally. It's different at every school but at my school we had it pretty good in terms of hotels and meals. We were well taken care of. 

 

Most D3 schools are very high academic institutions. Road trips always included guys studying on the bus or in the hotel after games. The season starts the day you get on campus after Christmas break and can go through finals week. This includes 4 games a week, 3 practices a week, 2-3 team workouts a week. It's a grind for sure but it's a heck of a fun time.