Launching new website brings back memories

As we launch our new website today, I can't help but recall how much we didn't have when I first arrived on Lander's campus during the fall of 1988.

Back then we didn't have internet, e-mail, or digital photography. You were in high cotton if your office had a fax machine. We booted up our computers with five-inch floppy discs, licked our own stamps and developed our own black and white film.

Needless to say, the sports information profession has gone through one, big overhaul over the past two decades. Today, everybody has a laptop, stamps have self-adhesive backs and who uses film anymore?

Nowadays, on the internet, one can pick just about any college or university and watch almost any game on video streams, listen to audio or watch updated live stats. There is no longer the need to wait for the 11 o'clock news or tomorrow's newspaper. It's there right now.

Before the development of statistical software, we had a person or crew – depending on the sport – who kept statistics during a game with actual paper and pencil. After the game, we would legibly print those numbers into the "Official Boxscore" and fax to the media, conference office and visiting team.

After faxing the game stats, we would then start calling the media outlets to give the final scores and leading scorers (just in case the fax ran out of paper or something tragic happened on the other end).

To cumulate season-long and career stats, we either used Excel (if you were smart enough to know the formulas) or manually update in good, old Microsoft Word.

Forget all that stuff now.

Nowadays, we just enter the stats during the game, type a story into the web page, import the game's statistical HTML file into our web page, and send the release in a mass e-mail to our media outlets with the game-file attachments.

It's a snap.

Well, it might be a little more than that, but it's nothing like it used to be.

In-game statistical programs began sprouting up in the late 80s, and, if one was fortunate enough to afford a program and laptop, you, too, could look impressive on press row with your computer, printer and the ability to produce instant stats.

Finis Horne, Lander's long-time Lander men's basketball coach (1968-97) was probably the first college basketball coach in South Carolina who had to have this technology. During my first year at Lander, I led the pencil and paper stat crew on the women's games and had two students, Beverly Kaib the inputter and Danny Crawford the spotter, doing the men's games on the laptop.

Before you jump to any conclusions on why we did the men's games on the laptop and not the women's, let me explain. I just didn't know I could create a second directory on the computer for the women. Plain and simple. We solved that problem the next year by purchasing a second laptop. Smart, eh?

Slowly, and I mean very slowly, other schools began to catch up with the technology. By the mid-90s, paper and pencil stats became a thing of the past and I didn't need to go on the road with the basketball teams anymore.

Instead of faxing stat sheets, the SIDs (Sports Information Directors) could just e-mail game files back and forth. Once you get the file, you just import it into your computer and, voila, instant updated stats. Statistical programs eventually became available for our other sports -- soccer, volleyball, baseball, softball, tennis and golf. That definitely put a dent in the No. 2 pencil business.

In 1997, we took one of those giant leaps for mankind. Lander produced its first website.

I was tabbed to develop the athletic web pages, but first, I had to pass a class in FrontPage 95. As soon as I got the official okey-dokey from my instructor, we became our own public relations firm. Updating that first website was a tedious process, but, hey, I didn't know any better.

While we still welcome any publicity we can get for our athletic program from radio, television and newspapers, fans quickly discovered they could go directly to our website and find what they needed in a timely manner.

And that brings us to where we are today.

Our new website -- with special thanks going to student workers Candace Etheredge and Jacob Lethco for their help in migrating information -- looks somewhat similar to the one we have used for the past six years, but with more up-to-date features. We are now hosted by PrestoSports and are interlinked with the Peach Belt Conference and 10 of the other 12 PBC schools.

This is great!

While most professionals are trained in their fields of employment, I have to look back on my days in the late 70s at Western Kentucky University in wonder. A Journalism/Spanish double major, I didn't take one computer course -- didn't want to. In fact, I only typed on a computer once before my second newspaper job three years out of college.

My generation of SIDs has literally had to learn all this technology -- word processing, statistical, desktop publishing, web page development, photography and a host of other computer programs -- on the fly.

While frustrating at times, it's been fun to be an active participant in all this development over the past 30 years.

As I bang out this column on my home computer, just a few feet to my left is one of my first manual typewriters -- a black, bulky L.C. Smith with an actual ribbon -- and it's proudly collecting dust on a table in my living room like a prized museum artifact. It might be worth a few bucks in a yard sale, but I wouldn't dare part with it.

I've literally punched hundreds of stories out on those keys, but, truthfully, I don't miss it one bit.

I hope you enjoy our new web page.