Another guy who thinks his site will be bigger than ESPN.com

HS sports is insanely localized.

I have a pretty involved local site -- two websites, Facebook, Twitter, a blog -- basically to promote live broadcasts that we do.

I get about 10-20 hits a day. Maybe 100-200 on a gameday (OK, shameless plug ... it's HancockCountySports.com if you're interested in checking out).

iHigh has some pretty cool stuff, but the people who are interested in the schools that are being broadcast will go to the site, for specialized reasons. It's not going to be a must-visit.

 

What's going to kill him, why go to some massive national site for preps when most states and regions already have dedicated, visible and popular high school sites bringing in hits? Ohio has several that I can think of.

I remember how brilliant "highschoolsports.net" was at the time. I remember it everytime I try loading the site to get a schedule and it crashes my computer.

 

Mine too. And like Maxpreps, it's reliant on contributions from coaches, boosters, ect.

Both Maxpreps and ESPNRise have their strong points. To me, Maxpreps is a good database for rosters, stats and schedules. ESPNRise, especially since adding Cal-Hi Sports to its lineup, has more accurate rankings, stronger reporting and its California record book may be the best single-state record book out there.

 

Awesome.

And didn't anyone in marketing tell these guys they had a high-school-giggle-worthy name in "iHigh"?

 

So, The Eagles played at opening of the KFC YUM! Arena, not at the launch of iHigh.com, correct? Fuck, I hope so.

highschoolsports.net is largely crap, and so is maxpreps, albeit much more reliable. The biggest thing I hate about these types of sites is the athletic directors in our area have become solely reliable on them, and more than half the time the skeds are incorrect. Just last week, for one of the schools that the AD never faxed the boys sked over as requested several times, I ended up going to the opposite town of where the game was supposed to be at - a 40 minute drive away.

Why wasn't there a game story for our kids? Because your athletic director is a douchebag.

 

Any sites that rely on ADs and coaches for the content are doomed to failure.

 

Maybe it's because I'm from California, but doesn't "iHigh" move your thoughts to the legalization debate?

 

Well played.

 

We always joked about attending Let'sget High.

 

Too many sites out there already like iHigh.

CoachesAid.com dominated the Oklahoma HS market back when I was still in high school and I ended up doing some free lance magazine stuff for them in college. Since then they've gone national and had some pretty good success.

 

Hey Matt, before you declare CoachesAid.com a success, you should probably check out this thread:

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/69988/

Definitely the interest in prep sports is too fragmented to really make any of these things work. And definitely the sites that rely on coaches and ADs to input information are doomed. I agree with that assessment wholeheartedly. We have a precious few in my area who use MaxPreps. There's another site the ADs are supposed to use to maintain their schedules, but it's hit and miss on whether they actually go in and update it when there are changes. We're constantly calling to make sure what we're seeing on that site is accurate.

You can't make people enter the information, and you can't make them do it more than once. In my area they report their box scores to the big metro and that's it. We can't get them to copy it to us, and I know of a handful of coaches using MaxPreps. Set these sites up all you want, but then someone has to actually use them.

 

Yep, not paying your people is a definite sign of success. Some people have interesting interpretations of success.