it’s time to shift to my “other job”.
I’m fortunate in that my two passions don’t overlap their seasons. Warm weather months get dedicated to golf – I’m a little off this year with only about 80 rounds played, normally I’d hit over 100 but the asthma knocked me out for a month. Cold weather months see my focus switch to Penn State basketball (practice started 12 days ago).
A friend of mine, Tim Beidel, runs a website, PennStateHoops.com, dedicated to the Nittany Lion basketball program. Tim resides in Portland Maine and started the site years ago as a way of remotely keeping up with the basketball program. He was frustrated that he had a really hard time finding information anywhere about Penn State basketball team and realized that others must be in the same boat so he started the site.
I started buying season basketball tickets when the school built our basketball arena, the Bryce Jordan Center in 1995. Like Tim, I lived in New England and couldn’t find any info on PSU basketball. I started trolling around the web and stumbled onto his site then. It was a godsend for those of us looking for PSU BB info. I started hanging around the site then, occassionally posting to the site forum.
A few years down the road, I met Tim and we hit it off (90%+ of the people on these boards I wouldn’t want anything to do with but Tim is an exception). We’ve been able to get together once or twice a year since then, either for a summer golf tournament, fall football game, or winter basketball game. Despite Tim being a married non-drinker and me the polar opposite we get along quite well (in addition to sharing a common perspective on Penn State basketball, our political and social views seem to jibe 100%).
Tim runs the website as a hobby and it’s become quite popular among the PSU hoops community. Fortunately, Tim has been able to keep the lunatic fringe often found on internet boards at bay (he even got some nice props in a story by a Harrisburg sportswriter). Penn State has numerous former players playing professional ball in Europe who use the site to keep up to date with the team. We also have recently been recruiting heavily in Europe – we have three players on the squad from overseas – and their friends and families use the board to keep track of their hometown heroes.
Over the years my contribution to the board has grown. In addition to regularly posting on the aforementioned forum, I have assumed responsibility for tracking our recruiting efforts by maintaining the “UncleLar Recruiting Matrix”. The matrix is a compilation of published reports of whom Penn State is targeting with their recruiting.
By NCAA rule, a school’s coaching staff can’t comment on anyone that they are recruiting. That creates a huge void which is filled by numerous internet recruiting services (for both football and basketball). The two biggest are the Rivals Network and the Scout Network. Each of these networks is a conglomeration of individual school sites which are run by local professionals. Blue White Illustrated runs the Penn State site on the Rivals Network while Fight On State is the Scout Networks Penn State site. Both of those websites are run by local professionals who also publish local magazines.
However, this area is so football oriented that staffs of BWI and FOS give short shrift to basketball, even during basketball season. That has opened up a niche within a niche for Tim’s board and he is able to put together a better product as a hobby than either of the professional organizations can. As evidence,
Tim’s board receives 10 times the traffic that either the BWI basketball board or the FOS basketball forum does and my recruiting matrix is also more complete that either the BWI recruiting table or the FOS table.
With basketball season just around the corner (we have an exhibition game next Thursday), basketball recruiting activities will pick up and I can settle into my “second job” just as my golf “job” winds down.