SEATTLE, Wash. - I sit here, surrounded by some of my favorite photos of some of my favorite girl's basketball players, not the least of which is my oldest daughter, Sassia, and I am reminded that the website this story aims to christen has been, oh, some nineteen years in the making. Sassia was born then and, later that same year, 1988, I was in Seoul, covering the Summer Olympic Games, and was captivated by the U.S. women's basketball team. That team claimed a gold medal for the ages and, though I'd already been a basketball guy through and through, I was at that point hooked on the female version.
Caroline Doty
This is no less a special time for me, as it is for Chris Hansen. For the past year or so, we have scrambled and hustled to establish an independent voice in and for the sport of girl's basketball. We have undertaken every measure we could imagine (including hanging up our cherished whistles) to remain unbiased and as transparent as possible with our motives and methodology. We are basketball people, but also journalists, who believe in exposing, promoting and nurturing this sport by providing a clearinghouse for accurate information, whether from us or you or any other credible source, and rational, fair thought. We post our head shots and bios below all our stories because we take responsibility for our work - and we want you to know why we are speaking to your daughter or player or friend.
The product is this, the new HoopGurlz.com. Part of me feels like we should be hanging one of those signs you see at airports around the country - "Pardon our mess." It was a major undertaking to put this new site together in such a short time. And we certainly are not finished.
Still, I am extremely proud of what we have so far. Some of our new features are downright ground-breaking, such as the ability for players to blog on their own Player Profile Pages. Registered users (accounts still are free) can post (positive and insightful) comments on Player Profile Pages, and we will offer multiple evaluations, instead of one, static eval that gets stale over time. We'll invite high-school and club coaches to offer their evaluations as well. Registered users also will be able to post comments directly onto stories.
Oh yeah, we have something many independent sites do not - a living, breathing, sortable player database. That was our most important mission. And guess what? We understand many of the girls use their Player Profile Pages as sort of basketball resumes, so they - or anyone, for that matter - can email links to those pages directly from this site. How cool is that? You've got to be registered and logged in, of course.
And guess what else? All that data many of you have been sending us the past few months? We're hiring people to input it all into the database. We are sorry for the delay; hopefully you understand and it will have been worth the wait.
We, on the other hand, have understood how important the message boards have become to many of you, as a way of trading opinions and information, so we've licensed the gold standard in message boards, vBulletin. We've also integrated the boards more into the main site. As you are cruising through news, lists or player pages, you can see how many of your friends and debate partners are logged into the forums. Plus we are going to expand the regional forums, adding to the Washington and DC/MD/VA forums that have proven so popular. New York and Texas are first on our list. If you want to nominate a state and moderate the forum, please use the Contact form and let us know.
Nneka Ogwumike
That's another thing: the Contact form. It has categories that are relevant to this site. If you choose the correct category, your email will go to the appropriate person.
The most important thing about this new website, in our opinion, is that it will allow us to expand our coverage. We'll be able to go more places, and hopefully involve more people. Just next week, for example, I will be in Colorado Springs to cover the USA Basketball U19 Trails and Chris will be in Irvine, Calif., for the West Coast Elite Spring Invitational. A week after that, we'll both be in the Cincinnati-Dayton area for the Nike Midwest Showdown, where we'll also have a booth at which players can submit data for Profile Pages and we'll also have video photographers. It may not be an evaluation event, but we'll cover it so the college coaches will feel like they witnessed it all.
This week will be about as good a week of content as we've ever produced. Today we are introducing our new, expanded 2008 rankings. We have more players ranked at this time of year than we ever have. Tomorrow, Chris profiles Nneka Ogwumike, who you'll notice is our new national No. 2 prospect. Wednesday, we introduce a new columnist, Alis Brown, who will write about the body, starting with those sometimes pesky knees. We'll also release our first-ever HoopGurlz Podcast, featuring an interview with UConn commit Caroline Doty and our discussion of the April evaluation period. Thursday, Chris hits you with another profile, on 2009 super-prospect Tierra Ruffin-Pratt. And Friday we resume the popular Prospect Watch column.
Whew. In the coming weeks, we'll have state lists to post, school lists to update and commitments to break.
So what are we asking in return? For you to register, just one more time. It will be as painless as before, the only change from the previous website being that you have to use a real email address that you will be asked to validate. We also request that you do not claim a username that someone else has used on the other forums. Remember, you no longer will be inhibited by the thousands of usernames that were taken up at ezboard and then Scout.
You probably are wondering when the next shoe is going to drop. Well, yes, we will start selling subscriptions in a few weeks. However, we will have as much, and probably more, free content as we ever had. We're committed to that. Our subscription product will revolve around more detailed evaluations and recruiting data. And it will be affordable - in case some of you want to subscribe, just to support us (smile).
Here's to a new era. I witnessed the start of one back in 1988. And things, I must say, turned out pretty well.
Glenn Nelson is the publisher of HoopGurlz.com. He also founded and coached the Dragons and Northwest HoopGurlz select girl's basketball teams. Glenn previously was the editor-in-chief at Scout.com and a longtime, national-award-winning basketball columnist and writer for The Seattle Times. His work also has appeared in several books and national magazines. He is co-author of "Rising Stars: The Ten Best Players in the NBA" (Rosen Publishing, 2002). He can be reached at hoopgurlz@comcast.net [1].
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