Site casts web over high school sports
Monday morning quarterbacks can get loads of statistics on weekend college and professional games, but what about the parents and coaches closely following high school sports in Missouri?
To fill this need, Area Sports Plus is stepping up to the plate with a new Web site. Created by IDP Group, the site will provide daily updates of area high schools’ statistics, schedules, scores and more. The use of MySQL databases to store such information will allow a viewer to search the data according to interest. For instance, a college scout could sort all players by their stats, a parent could find out what time the big game starts and teen athletes could scope out their competition at this one stop sports shop.
Area Sports Plus is a magazine that publishes preseason information and postseason wrap-ups about six times each year. Michael Luman of Area Sports Plus said that growing popularity of the magazine is what inspired them to expand. Although the Web site has features that could not be replicated in the magazine, Luman said the concept behind both media is the same: Cover high school sports.
“We want to give all schools and all sports equal coverage in Missouri,” Luman said.
Click on the “Schools” tab to find out the name, mascot and location of every school covered. Selecting the name of a particular school will pull up related information, such as news stories. Also, you can arrange the schools in any one of those categories by selecting the title of the column. For instance, if you wanted to easily view all schools in Columbia, click “City” to arrange schools alphabetically by city name.
Luman said that the site will begin by listing information for schools in a core area around Kirksville and Columbia. They will continue to add schools until they cover all of Missouri and, eventually, beyond.
“Once we really get Missouri, we want to branch out to other states,” Luman said. “People want it; there’s a need. There’s not anything else out there like it.”
Most of the information on the site is interlinked, which makes for easy searching. For instance, a track fan could click on the “Sports” tab, select “Track” to find a list of schools with teams, and then choose a certain team to find their roster, scores, schedules and so on.
And don’t worry if your sport is not typically championed in the media. Clicking on “Cheerleading” will reveal just as much information as “Football” — all sports that are a part of the Missouri State High School Activity Association are covered.
Under the “Players” tab, you can find a profile for each athlete. These profiles include the basics, such as the players’ schools and sports teams, as well as detailed information, such as their statistics, news stories about them and even room for personal sports blogs. Eventually, as the site continues to be updated, you could trace a player’s history through all four years of high school. Area Sport Plus hopes that in the future, college recruiters will use the site to sort players.
“Scouts can go on there and see how individuals are performing,” Luman said.
The “Games and Tournaments” tab allows viewers to select a sport and find schedules, scores and more. Potentially, that could be an overwhelming amount of information to keep posted. As the site grows, Area Sports Plus plans to enlist students or coaches to update the site’s information on their own schools. This strategy would be mutually beneficial.
“All the media could go there to find out what happened at the game last night,” Luman said. “The coach can [update the site] instead of having to send out several faxes or e-mails or make a lot of calls.”
Other content on the site will include sports news, the week’s top players, health and fitness articles from guest writers, interviews with professional athletes and information on scholarship and other reward programs offered by Area Sports Plus.