Something new for next year and ideas

Something Coach Russo mentioned to me this year was talking about doing a page dedicated to the FR/GR team, with pics, a small profile and what not. This got me thinking. I'd like to do a preseason preview of the HS rankings for each class in a similar fashion. A small profile, with a pic of the #1 ranked preseason wrestler per weight, in each class and maybe a profile of the #2 and maybe #3 preseason kids.

Then at the end of the year, do a pre state preview as well doing the same thing. I'd still have the profiles and pics on file and would more than likely only need to update a few here and there.

What this would entail is a little help from the coaches from around the state, helping to gather the info. Wouldn't be too much like GPA, possible college wrestling program choice or fan of, etc, then I would just need a head shot of the wrestler. Its something you could ask the parent to do or the coaches could do and just email it to me. I know you guys are busy like myself, but I think this could really benefit our sport more as we fight for more coverage.

I'm going to also try harder to possible come up with some topics to talk about during the year. One thing that I think separates us from the other sports, especially in OR, is that when you look at the message boards, its pretty much the same people talking about wrestling every year. I know a lot of coaches encourage kids not to talk on O-Live or my message board, but believe it or not, newspapers gauge a lot of interest based on message board chatter. So, my thought is, maybe we should be encouraging kids to talk about their teams or potential matchups on the open forums more often, in a positive way.

For instance, I can go to O-Live and see that the state wide wrestling board is on message 15826 today and go to the UO Ducks FB forum and see that its on 77421(yeah I know you're Beavers so it shouldn't matter) and even go to OSU FB and see that its on message 40441. That's a 25000 and 62000 message difference. Then you look at how much coverage they get and see that they get a ton of coverage. So, as a newspaper you see that and know that more people are interested in reading about FB in our state. If wrestling got those type of numbers, we'd start to see more articles about OR college and HS wrestling. Heck, maybe OR colleges take notice and see that OR wrestling is important. Trust me, I know I used to work for a newspaper.

My point is, as coaches, as much as it pains us, I'm thinking in order to make our voices heard in the state and keep things like UO from happening again, we need to get the wrestling public more interested in the cyber space chatter. We've been too quiet for too long.