College Fanz - Virtual Pressbox

College Fanz has a page dedicated to each sport for all NCAA, NAIA, NCCAA and USCAA colleges and had the need to allow all the Sports Information Directors (SIDs) across the country to be able update their individual game schedules as well as their school information on the main site. Each of the over 1450 schools can play up to 57 sports which can add up to a lot of time being spent on scheduling and updating the results of games played.

The challenge was to create an intuitive and efficient system for all the Sports Information Directors to be able to quickly enter and update games across all their sports. SIDs typically don’t have a lot of time to spare so the application had to be very easy to use and had to take into account the different intricacies of each sport and not burden the SIDs with having to learn a new system.

• We built a rich internet application (RIA) using Flex that allowed each SID to have a customized view of each of their sports and be able to enter their entire season schedule for a sport in under 2 minutes. The information was updated in real time on the main site. The application also allowed the SIDs to maintain the information about their school that was presented on the College Fanz website.
• Schedule data entered by the SIDs on the College Fanz site was in turn distributed back to the individual college’s website as well as local newspaper sites along with the real time scores. This eliminated redundant data entry for the busy SIDs and exposed the data across multiple sites.
• We also built a widget that users could place on their most used site, whether yahoo or Google to keep up to date with the schedules and game scores.

• The site was able to attract almost all the SIDs to enter their school information because of the easy to use single point of data entry.
• The widget helped promote user stickiness and increased the number of users since additional users from alumni to student’s parents were able to easily keep up to date with the schedules and game scores.