Whew - What A Weekend

Well the first weekend of games has come and gone and it is amazing every year you think you are ready and then it gets here and there are a 100 little things that you didn't get done in preparing for the season.

The Cowgirl Soccer team opened the season with a big win over Trinity in the first home contest of the year. It was the first time the Cowgirls have defeated Trinity in the regular season. HSU then went on the road Saturday to defeat Southwestern, 2-1. HSU tied both teams a year ago in the opening weekend.

On Friday, the Cowgirl volleyball team was beginning the Sabrina Bingham era at the UT-Dallas Tournament. HSU dropped its two matches on Friday, but returned with two big wins on Saturday to go 2-2.

Saturday was a crazy day. After setting up the press box and getting ready for the football game, I went over to the soccer field for the first game of the men's soccer season. They lost 2-0 to UTPB, but showed some promise for the season.

I rushed over to football to get ready for the game. Anyone that knows me, knows I am a technology junkie. One of the things I have done in the past is have livestats in front of the radio guys via linked computer. I have to borrow a laptop from technology services and it is linked via the network to the computer where the game stats are kept and they see the stats as they are updated. I received a new computer this summer and I did not have a program installed on it to connect the computers so that was the first thing that went wrong.

Then the game started and UWL had an amazing first half, although we seemd to gather some momentum toward the end of the half. When I went to print the stats for halftime, my printer I have been using for seven years now decided it was time for it to retire. So I was without a printer in the press box.

Well I took a deep breath and got ready for the second half, right as it is about to start the radio guys come in and say that the Internet stream was making a horrible high=pitched noise. There is nothing worse than that for a listener on the other end. I called the company that streams our games and don't get a response.

The reason was they had a system failure and they were down. They finally got the problem fixed about 11:30, but unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) our listeners did not get to hear the second half.

We have been working with Stretch Internet off and one for about four years now and I will go to bat for them, they have always been a great solution for us on the streaming side. They still are, they just had some problems that were out of their control. I know it was frustrating for some of our listeners and without us being on the radio this season it is the only option. Stick with us, I think it will eventually be a great solution for us and we will be streaming more games in more sports than ever.

Again we apologize for the problems and we stand behind Stretch.

Now to the second half of the football game, we got the ball first and immediately came down and scored and then got a three and out and was driving again before stalling out. From then on out UWL played great and they got the victory.

This is my eighth season at HSU and personally I think that is the best team we have faced in that time, including the 2000 year when we went to the semifinals. UWL is a very good team and we will be too. When you are starting new players all over the field it will take some time, unfortunately for the Cowboys they did not have that time before Saturday. The young guys were immediately thrown to the fire against a very good team.

One of the things that the weekend brought was a look at the updated Game Tracker. Our Internet provider CSTV, has really upgraded the Gametracker and have integrated features such as showing a player's picture when they are involved in a play. It is really a neat feature and if you have never had the opportunity to watch Gametracker on the Internet it is a nice touch, especially when the stream went down.

If you have ever wondered what it is like after a game - let me tell you it is a hectic couple of hours around here. Immediately after the game I come right over to my office and we print out what we call the books. It has all of the stats, play-by-play, etc from the game. We give those to the media covering the game and 10 to each team.

For a night game, I immediately send out an e-mail with the boxscore of the game to a prearranged media list. That way they can get the scores and the basics of the game. I also have a fax group send set up that goes to our opponents' media that are not on the e-mail list.

After that I update the web site with a box score and up-dated stats. This past Saturday was another challenge because we had men's and women's soccer and volleyball. I was able to update the men's soccer stats before the football game and volleyball and women's soccer finished up their games about the time the football game started.

I updated their stats on the web so at least the scores were on the web. At this point it was about 9:45 and the deadline for the ARN is 10:20 on Saturday so I need to have it to them by about 10 on Saturday's. I banged out a quick recap of all four contests (two volleyball and men's and women's soccer) and sent that out to the media list. Since the paper staffed the football game it was least imperative that I write that story before deadline so I wrote the football story after that. I then put the stories up on the HSU site and they were all on the web site with photo galleries for football and men's soccer by 10:45.

After that I followed up on a few e-mails about the stream being down and I updated the HSU pages on D3Football and D3kicks web sites. I also vote on a national poll for football so I checked the national scoreboard and prepared my ballot that is due on Sunday mornings. I finally walked out the door at about 12:30. I was back in the office by noon on Sunday. That is the day I work on players of the week nominations, do game notes for football and get ready for, what by our standards is, a light week in the fall.

I pride myself on getting the most information on our web site the fastest on game day. If at all possible there are results and updated stats of events the day of games on our site. If it is not updated, there has been a problem. If you notice something amiss on the site, please don't hesitate to drop me an e-mail. I am getting closer to having all of the rosters on the web for this year and all of the schedules are up.