World Wide Sports
By Nora Paul The Poynter Institute
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not much of a sports fan. I have no special teams I loyally root for. But I am a dedicated fan of Uplink so when the assignment for the column was changed to sports, I didn't try to punt it back.
After "adult entertainment" sites, there are probably more Internet sites dedicated to sports topics than anything else. I don't go to them. In fact, a friend who runs a big sports server called to tell me all about his new venture when he was starting it up and I said, "Oh great, just what the Internet needs, another damn sports site." I haven't heard much from him lately.
But then, as often happens, life made me face something that I had avoided. I had to train sports copy editors and reporters at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on how to use the Internet. I had to explore sports sites. And I came away with an appreciation of some of the services and their meticulous arrangement and wide scope of sports information. I also realized that sports stories aren't just for the sports section, as a big story in Minneapolis, and in a number of other communities, has revealed. The hostage taking of communities by major league sports teams insisting they need a new stadium or they'll leave town is a business story, a community story and a government story.
So, whether you are a copy editor needing some verification of names and statistics, a reporter covering a big game or the investigative reporter needing to background some rich sport franchises' dealing, here are some sports links that can help.
Hope they help you pitch a field goal, or some such thing.
Links pages
Sometimes, finding the site that has the best collection of links is your first, best bet in searching.
Rely on "Web scouts" who go out and locate good sites rather than wading through the vast listings in large search engine sites. Here are a couple of good ones:
World Wide Web of Sports http://www.tns.lcs.mit.edu/cgi-bin/sports A sort of Yahoo of sports sites, compiled by students at MIT. The first page will link you to the listings for specific sports or click the "Sports Search" link to get a search box and look for specific items.
Handilinks http://www.ahandyguide.com/ Check out this guide to Internet resources - categorized in broad subject areas. Click on sports and get a wonderful listing by sport, from back-packing to wrestling, with sub-categories for teams and other topics.
A great way to find the specific Web sites of particular sports teams, but be careful that you are looking at the "official" Web site, not just a fan's ravings.
Tip for finding sports link pages:
Go to the Infoseek search site (www.infoseek.com) and put in the search box: +title:links +title:<name of sport.
You'll find pages with the title containing the word "link" and the name of the sport you are interested in.
Mega-sports sites
CBS SPORTSLINE http://cbs.sportsline.com/index.html Get the latest news for free, pay $4.95 per month for other features and functions and access to reference works like the Information Please Sports Almanac.
ESPN http://ESPN.SportsZone.com/ OK, even for a non-sports nut, ESPN's array of players' statistics and the manipulation and cross comparisons that can be done with the statistics is very impressive. Want to see your favorite player's statistics compared with others, you'll have to subscribe to the service, also at $4.95/month.
SPORTSNETWORK.COM http://www.sportsnetwork.com/home.asp Looking for U.S. and non-U.S. sports action?
This site specializes in providing sports scores, news and information from around the world from a number of different information services.
RULES OF THE GAME .FAQ http://ps.superb.net/FAQ/ A wonderful collection of faq's (frequently asked questions) that has details of the rules for every sport from AFM racing to volleyball. Search tip: use the same technique as for finding link pages but put "rules" in the title: search.
Other interesting things
INTERNETS: your global link to 1,000s of databases http://www.internets.com/ssportlk.htm The category for "sports" has databases for auto racing, baseball, football, skiing and several other sports. Some are databases of articles, others are databases of statistics and information.
Calculators On-Line http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/HSG/RefCalculators1C.html Golf handicap, leader size for fishing, freefall in parachuting, even quarterback passing rating these are just a few of the calculators you are linked to from this site.
Nora Paul can be reached at (813) 821-9494, or send e-mail to npaul@poynter.org