Crimson Red Sports

Well, now that we have the forum up and running, and the blog in place for when we actually have something to blog about, it is time to turn our attention to recruiting.  I would like to build the absolute best recruiting site that we possibly can.  I am not talking about just a forum where we have sticky topics and posts, although that will be a small part of it.  That is fine if that is the only capability you have.  But we are not constrained by that limitation.  We can build whatever we want.  This site didn't even exist until last week, and look at it now.  Imagine what we can do if we focus on building a recruiting site for a few weeks.  I am very excited about this next phase of the site.

I was hoping that Tidal Surge would make his way over here by now to help us out.  But I suppose he has too much hard work invested in the other place, and I can't blame him for not wanting to do the work all over again.  If he does decide to come over, we welcome his insights and participation.

However, I am sure that there are others who would be willing to step up and help out.  The first thing we need to do is build a list of requirements for what we want from the recruiting section.  Here are some of my initial thoughts:

1.  We need a recruiting database to capture all of the information about the recruits.  I will need your help to define what types of information we want to track for each recruit.  By capturing this information in a database, we don't have to worry about posting templates or anything like that.  The database will store the raw information, and the web site will generate a nicely formatted view of that information.

2.  This will probably end up being a series of pages.  The master page will be accessed by a Recruiting command on the main site menu between Forum and Members.  That page will probably have a list of the recruits and some basic information about each one.

3.  You click on the recruit to see his details.  That will take you to another page with all of his information.  We need to put together a list of everything we want to store, but things like pictures, videos, tweets, news articles, etc. will be readily available.  Another cool thing is that we can actually watch the videos without leaving the site if they are on youtube.

4.  Each recruit will also have a sub-forum that is dedicated to that recruit, for any sort of forum discussion that takes place about him.  This forum board will be accessed from the recruits web page.

So, if you would like to help out in some way, please reply to this article with your comments or suggestions.  I am a professional software engineer, so I can handle all of the technical stuff.  Don't be intimidated by that aspect of the project.  I know some of you have serious computer skills as well, and I am sure we can make use of your talents if you would like to contribute in that way.  But the great majority of the work will be actually collecting the recruiting data, and helping determine what types of data should be collected in the first place.  Once that data is collected, we need people who are knowledgeable about recruiting to look it over, verify it, and edit it as necessary.  So there is plenty of work to go around, even if you don't know anything about computer programming.  Let's use the replies to this article as a place to brainstorm and see what we can come up with.

It should be pretty interesting.  I am excited to hear the ideas that you guys put forth.

SUPERCOACH one thing I would suggest is that we supply a link to most of the the supplied lead post. Maybe that cuts out alot of the he said/she said stuff. RTR!

Yep, I think that is the way to go.

Great idea, and indeed it will take lots of work.  I don't have the time or talent to handle this.  I will contribute as I've done.

Keep in mind that whoever is in charge needs access to the paid sites to get the full info.

The work that TidalSurge did on TS was the key to success of much of the forum; people want to see that info at one location.  It was a great format, with only the contributed information about the recruit (not every comment) was there for easy review.

Sorry I can't do it.

Even if you can't work on it, I would love to have everyone's opinions and suggestions on how it should work.  Just posting your ideas is actually a pretty big contribution.

Here is a first draft of what I think we should store for each recruit:

1.  Recruit Number (unique database ID)
2.  First Name
3.  Last Name
4.  Class Year
5.  High School
6.  City
7.  State
8.  Position(s)
9.  Recruiting site links
10.  YouTube video(s)
11.  Status (Prospect, Very Interested Prospect (UA in top 3), Offered, Verbal, Signed, Enrolled)
12.  Dedicated discussion board for this recruit
13.  Article links
14.  Visit(s) (Date, Official or Unofficial)
15.  Tweets or quotes from the recruit
16.  Picture (I almost forgot this)
17.  Other school(s) with mutual interest (maybe have the same status field described in #11 for each school)

Anything else?  Comments?  Suggestions?

Discuss.

Something I would like to point out for those of you who are not computer programmers:

By putting all of this stuff in a database, it will become very powerful.  We can easily search through it and find all sorts of information.  Consider this example:  we are getting close to NSD.  A top verbal commit changes over to another school (sound familiar).  This guys happens to play... hmmm... let's say TE.  With a database setup like what I plan to build, we could immediately go to the recruiting page and have it show us all of the 2012 TE's with interest.  So just like that we know immediately who our backup guys would be.  This is just one tiny example.  I couldn't possibly list all of the useful things that we will be able to do with this once it is built.

On the other hand, if you just have a forum board with a topic for each recruit, well then you have to do all the work to find out who all of those backup TE's are.

How about this one:  You know we are recruiting a kid from Michigan, but you can't remember his name.  With the forum setup you have to manually dig through pages of recruits, looking for kids from Michigan.  With a database set up, you could just click on the State column and boom, the recruit list is sorted by state.  Normally it would probably be sorted by Last Name, which is way better than the arbitrary last post time that you get with a forum.  But you could easily sort by any field: Name, State, Position, Status, just to name a few to get you thinking.

Wow SUPERCOACH you got it superfine now! We have to find general and SC some help for the recruiting. RTR!

Sounds super.  This would really simplify recruit searches and organization.  Thanks.

Surge has put hundreds of hours into the recruiting forum at Woolly Al. I just don't know if anyone will have the time/desire to put that much work into a Recruiting board here. I'm not drying to be a downer but I realize how much work it truly is.

It is definitely a lot of work.  We will see how it goes.  I think it will be worth the effort in the end.

Well this is going to be fun to keep up. I love recruiting almost as much as games, lol. RTR!