MaxPreps.com: Another possible revenue stream squandered by newspapers?

www.cincinnati.com/preps/

does a great job with boys and girls basketball and football

 

Cincinnati is done the same as many other sites do it (as does MaxPreps) - by getting stats from the coaches/stat people. Not sure hiow else you would get everything on a site, especially in cities with tons of high schools.

I know Gannett was looking into its own high school stat product, not sure if this is is or not. MaxPreps used to be SportsHuddle, if I recall, and that system was just ok - and very slow loading.

 

They've always done that, though. And it isn't always intentional. The first time I covered a major prep football game that had multiple papers covering, it was probably late 1970s. I picked up the largest paper in the state, read its story and thought, "Oh cripes, I must have screwed up somehow, all their stats are different than mine." Then I read the other papers and nobody's stats matched anyone else's. High school stats are like that -- meaningless. People want them, sure, but it's bullshit.

Unless Maxpreps starts staffing as many games as we can, I won't worry. That's what people really want, and that costs a lot of money to do. By the looks of their site, their "revenue stream" is a long, long way from allowing them to compete with us.

People are going to realize that the Internet is a kind of anarchy and that people can input whatever they want and it doesn't make it true. We'll still have the credibility, although we certainly don't deserve any, either, as far as stats are concerned. But people are still going to have the perception that we have higher standards of accuracy than some barely monitored Internet site. Did we miss the boat on this? Maybe, but we can catch up any time we want to.

 

A couple of stops ago, we met for weeks with a company called, I believe, Sports Stats, that was to take away all of our inputting worries and have prep stats/rosters/schedules that were accurate and up to date. But without, yes, newspaper folks covering the games and providing the stats, they faced the same why-should-I attitude of prep coaches. MaxPreps is fine on its scale, but readers care far more about their local leaders, kept by local writers.

 

Our paper tries hard and has a nifty online database for all the prep stuff. But stats is really hard to do because you still have to rely on the coaches. some simply do not care if the stats get reported.

but our system updates records, standings, and simple stats such as individual points scored in sports like basketball and soccer automatically.

but I do check out maxpreps every now and then to get stats on some of the schools I cover for features and the like.

 

A little off topic...

What concerns me about MaxPreps, highschoolsports.net, etc. (yes, I'll throw the high school sites of rivals.com in here, too) is what they will become: pay-per-view sites with "subscriber content". No way these sites exist out of the goodness of someone's preps-loving heart.

And when they do, are the parents going to pay for MaxPreps or the Podunk Press?

 

most of our schools won't even put their rosters on their own school websites, let alone input stats into some other website.Every season we send out the same letter, asking for coaches to email schedules, rosters and stats, etc., every year we get about 35 percent cooperation.

 

might be a pain in the arse, but it sounds like a few personal visits to schools during preseason is in order.

That, and you need to send those letters to the AD and/or prinicpals, too.

 

That happens all the time. I used it a lot for out of the area teams during football and records, scores, points for/against and stats were a lot of times wrong. The stats for our teams, when they were there, were mostly wrong as well. It's a great idea but the execution needs to be better.

 

Scores can be reported by anyone as long as they have an account, so if I felt inclined I could go to some random school's site and say that they lost to Cheesecock Technical 69-22. There's been a handful of times where the records are skewed because they'd double report scores against schools because they'd get the school confused (there's three Patrick Henry High Schools in my state, so they'd report scores against the one in the west and the one in the capital, even though they only played one of them)

 

From what I heard, Gannett's system was horribly designed and inefficient to use on all ends. Many papers that used it are scrapping it.

The problem is that many of these databases are designed by people that know next to nothing about sports. Those that do have some working knowledge don't know that high school stats are a different beast than professional stats.

 

It's good for some out-of-area stuff, but as far as the primary school on our beat goes, I use what I have witnessed or received from the coaches.

(And even then, I've had a coach crumple a stat sheet because he knew the 17-year-old girl he put in charge wasn't half-ass paying attention to the game when there are friends to text.)

But that's why so many of us push toward the next level, I guess: the hope that colleges or pros have their shit together just a tad better.