Sports Reporting Technologies Launches High School Sports Portal

A new Internet technology company plans to fill the information gap that has been left as newspaper companies cut costs and coverage in order to stay afloat.

Sports Reporting Technologies LLC of Akron has developed a sports news portal platform designed to enable in-depth, online news coverage of high school sports throughout the country through licensed use of its proprietary sports reporting platform.

The company will officially launch its platform with its pilot site www.sportsink.com on Aug. 27, when the 2009 Ohio high school football season begins.

The SportsInk.com pilot site will provide in-depth news coverage of high school sports in two Ohio counties covering the greater Akron area, Summit and Medina counties, a total of 35 high schools in five separate conferences. Initial coverage will focus on the fall sports football, girls' volleyball, girls' and boys' soccer and girls' and boys' cross country. This winter, the site will add coverage of girls' and boys' basketball, wrestling and girls' and boys' swimming/diving. And, next spring, the site will cover baseball, softball and girls' and boys' track and field. The site will offer more than 500 pages of high school sports content in its first year.

In addition to news, game schedules, results and statistics, the platform enables online publishers and fans to add photo galleries, audio and video.

Future plans include adding modules to cover golf, tennis, lacrosse, bowling, hockey and field hockey, as well as a host of additional user features.

According to Jeff Brewer, general manager of the SportsInk pilot site and a partner in Sports Reporting Technologies, the system his site will use has been carefully crafted to suit the reporting needs of high school sport teams.

"High school coaches don't have the time to provide the detailed stats day-to-day that college teams do, but there's significant interest in game scores, team and individual numbers and rankings, as well as game coverage. The Sports Reporting Technologies platform provides exactly the amount of information that high school coaches will be comfortable providing and enough to satisfy the palette of high school sports fans."

In addition to having high school coaches submit information online, the site will employ a number of reporters who will help cover individual games and flesh out coverage with game stories, feature articles and sports round-up stories.

Once the pilot site has been launched, Sports Reporting Technologies plans to license its system to other entrepreneurs and local newspapers nationwide that are looking to profitably cover high school sports without incurring the high cost of technology investment.

"We view this as a tremendous opportunity for sports writers and other journalists who may have lost their job in this recession to claim their own destiny with their own sports reporting business. It's also well suited for local papers that can't afford a large technology investment," said Angela Charles, managing partner of Sports Reporting Technologies. "This system can easily be adapted to a wide range of business models, from covering a single sport for many schools or several sports for a single conference. The flexibility of the system makes it extremely attractive."

For more details about Sports Reporting Technologies, visit www.sports-reporting.net.

View the pilot site at www.sportsink.com.