The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We have heard that saying for most of our life and it is really true. We are going to undergo some major changes to what we have typically done for promoting our programs for the new school year, but that does not mean that you are going to get anything less.
We have always tried hard to be on the leading edge of what we do as far as promoting our teams and athletes. We were the first Division III team in the nation to use an outside firm for the design of our web site. We were the first Division III school to offer livestats on our web site (starting with baseball in the spring of 2000). We have always won more awards than any other school (Honda Award, NFF Scholarships, Academic All-Americans, All-Americans, All-Region, etc.) in our conference.
We are still going to do that. Having a good web site and pushing our kids for awards has always been my top two goals. Those things ARE NOT going to change.
What is changing is how we go about promoting our department through the web site. As many of you know the way media covers college athletics has changed. We used to get a lot more coverage than we do now. We are still grateful for what we do get, but local college is not their focus anymore and that is too bad.
The role of the SID office nationally is changing from working with the media to becoming our own media. Of course, we are still going to accommodate the media when the do come out to our events, but we are going to be driving force about telling the story of our programs. The internet is a powerful tool for not only promoting ourselves, but recruiting student-athletes.
As many of you know we are not printing media guides for most of our sports anymore. We will still be doing a guide but it will be done on-line for the sports we have done them in the past (volleyball, soccer, basketball, baseball and softball). That is great in two areas for me. We have unlimited space and we can expand those books (especially the bios) and we also are able to keep them updated more than once a year.
One of my main passions is writing and that is something that I have gotten away from. I am going to write a lot more, especially features on our kids. We have also beefed up the bios on each player, adding career and season game-by-game stats as well as action photos for some of the sports. I implemented those in the spring last year and some of them have been updated. We will be updating those more in season and all of our student-athletes will have a complete bio this year.
The thing we have been behind on is our video. That is changing. Video is going to be our concentrated focus. We will be live streaming a majority of our home games with audio (when possible) and video. We will only have a setup for one event at a time so I will have to make some decisions on what games will be shown when we have multiple events going at the same time. I think for the fall we only have four conflicts. It will also be integrated with livestats for the sports that we do live stats for. We are providing this service to our fans free of charge, rather than charging a subscription.
Streaming of games is just the start of what we will be doing video wise this season. Below is the schedule that I have devised for the fall. It will be similar for the basketball seasons and then also in the spring.
Monday – Weekend Recap 3-5 minutes of recaps from the previous weekends games, with highlights when available.
Tuesday – Men’s and women’s soccer, volleyball and cross country coaches shows. These will be 3-5 minutes each highlighting your programs. We will do a quick recap of last week, a quick look ahead to this week, honor a player of the week and spotlight one of your athletes.
Wednesday – Football coaches show. This will be 3-5 minutes each highlighting the program. We will do a quick recap of last week, a quick look ahead to this week, honor a player of the week and spotlight one of your athletes.
Thursday – Coming This Weekend – a 1-2 minute preview of this weekend along with a weekly column that I will be writing.
Friday – Getting to know a student-athlete feature. This will be 1-2 minutes of video to go along with a written feature each week.
A student-athlete from each sport will also be writing a weekly blog that will appear on the web site in their own words.
We will also beef up our presence on Twitter and Facebook. Everything that we put on www.hsuathletics.com , will also find its way on to the facebook page and I will be posting in-game updates on the facebook and twitter pages on the games that I am at. If you have not already done so and you are a facebook or twitter person, please sign up.
I am looking forward to a great season. I am excited about the possibilities for a lot of our teams this season.
If you have ideas let me know on the comments section of this blog. We will not post comments that come anonymous, especially when they are unfounded rumors or fabrications.
Chad
