Is there any cultural phenomenon bigger than the Internet craze? Sure, the sports craze. Americans just can't seem to get enough sports: Super Bowl Sunday, March Madness, Breakfast at Wimbledon. So what happens when the World Wide Web meets the wide world of sports? Even more craziness.
These days, die-hard fans -- men and women -- don't just argue at the local sports bars. They use discussion boards to dissect big trades and to second-guess game strategy. They register with online services to get the latest stats. They use the Web to follow sports that don't make the local paper.
This edition of @work explains how the Web is changing the game for sports fans. You'll meet four young professionals who use the Web for everything from following teams in distant cities to collecting statistics for Rotisserie baseball. You'll meet the chief creative officer of a Web site that's devoted to total-immersion reports on far-out adventure sports -- from mountain climbing to around-the-world yacht races. And you'll find our scoreboard of the major sports-news destinations: a comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of Web sites from ESPN, CNN/Sports Illustrated, and the other big names in sports media.
Let the games begin!
Team Player: Therese Wells, 37, works in Seattle as a high-tech marketing consultant. From a professional standpoint, Seattle is the perfect place for Wells to be. But from an extracurricular standpoint -- Wells is a passionate sports fan -- Seattle feels like Siberia. She moved there from Los Angeles five years ago. She didn't mind Seattle's abundant rain or its strong coffee. But she hated feeling isolated from her beloved Lakers, and she hated not feeling up to speed on the strengths and weaknesses of the teams at USC, her alma mater. "The Seattle papers drive me crazy," Wells complains. "They think that college football begins and ends at the University of Washington."
Wells was hamstrung by one other problem: As an avid fan of women's sports, she was hard-pressed to find information on that topic in the local news outlets -- a problem that's hardly unique to Seattle. "A depth and breadth of coverage of women's sports just doesn't exist in the traditional media," she says.
Game Plan: Wells uses the Web to get beyond the parochial focus of the local sports page. For example, when she "wants to find out what's really going on in college sports," she visits the online version of the Los Angeles Times (www.latimes.com).
She also uses the Web to get a daily dose of information on women's sports. One of her favorite sites is WNBA.com (www.wnba.com). It offers news and feature articles, player bios, scores and stats, and game schedules. It also has links to team sites. For information on women's soccer, Wells takes a time-out at FIFA.com (www.fifa.com), the Web site of the Federation Internationale de Football Association. It was here that she learned that the Women's World Cup finals would take place at the Rose Bowl between June and July. "The only reason I found out when tickets were going to be available," Wells says, "is that I'd gone online."
Keep Your Head in the Game: Wells also uses the Net to satisfy what she calls her "bizarre fascination with recruiting." Last year, she used the Web to follow the WNBA draft. She had a particular interest in the fate of several players from Stanford. ESPN's Web site, ESPN.com (www.espn.com), allowed her to follow the draft live -- from her desk.
Wells even uses the Net to connect with other fans. When the Seattle Reign, from the now-defunct American Basketball League, fired its coach, Wells had to speak her mind. She visited the message board on that team's site: "I got in touch with people I couldn't have found anywhere else."
Coordinates: Therese Wells, theresewells@yahoo.com
Team Player: Benjamin Friedland, 23, is a fan of the Web. As an account coordinator at i-traffic, a fast-growing interactive agency in New York City, he helps companies to transform their relationships with customers. Friedland is also a huge fan of Rotisserie baseball -- the popular pastime in which friends assemble fantasy teams by "drafting" major-league players. The teams compete by tracking the statistical performances of the players on each roster.
Game Plan: Early last year, when Friedland and 14 of his college friends formed their league, they knew that the Web would play a big role in their competition. They didn't want to sift through box scores, or to track trades and roster moves by thumbing through a newspaper every day. "We wanted a Web tool that would give us one-stop shopping," Friedland says. "Stats, standings, analysis -- everything available."
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