To the other people using Preps Factory, you have my deepest sympathy. I hate that with the utmost passion. It never works as intended and has screwed up our stats for two years now.
Anyway, when the idea of local-local struck back in the day, our publisher and editors (all 18 of them, just kidding) were convinced that sports was the catalyst to get it all started. We would tell parents, coaches, players, grandparents to go to our site and input their stats and everything would be super-duper awesome. When we brought up the fact that parents and grandparents can't be trusted to porvide correct information, they said "OK, well, we'll just stick to coaches for now."
So, they decided to throw this big supper/social one night and invite all of the area coaches and their statisticians down to the office so we could unveil our new master plan of covering high school football on the Internet. We sent out invitations to some 50 high schools, letting them know that plenty of food and adult beverages would be on hand. We went out and purchased enough food to feed 150 and enough adult beverages to keep Keifer Sutherland occupied for 24 hours. Guess how many people showed up? 12. Yep, that's right, 12. Of those 12, only 8 schools were represented.
The funny thing is that before they started planning all of this stuff, I tried to tell our publisher, editors and anybody else who would listen that it wasn't going to work. But they said "Oh, it's going to be great, we expect probably 85-90 percent turnout." The first year of our "new" high school site on the web, maybe 40% of the teams had their rosters. Of that, maybe a handful actually had stats. I tried to tell them that if they really wanted to do it right, they'd have to hire someone full-time just to do that site. They said it could be done with minimal staff effort, as long as we mainly relied on coaches/statisticians to report their stats. Yeah, that worked out well.
Two years later, that part of our website doesn't get any hits and doesn't get updated other than each team's schedule. Most of the rosters are wrong, because they wanted us to do them in spring to get a headstart on it (and everyone here probably knows how much rosters change from spring to fall). They gave up on putting stats after that meeting with the coaches. They also nixed the idea of allowing each player access to his personal page so he could do a daily blog, update his personal info and whatnot. All it took was showing them a few of the myspace pages out there for them to realize they didn't want to travel that road.
