I've been kicking around a lot of ideas for some time now about how to make our recruiting coverage more comprehensive. Since I don't get to do CougCenter full time, sometimes it takes a while to get all these crazy things floating around my head into practice.
The first step in that process was starting our "Coug Commit" coverage for football. Each of those features is designed to give you a first look at the recruit once he's sort of semi-official, and follows with the stated mission of the site. We always want to bring you stuff you can't get anywhere else, and we use those features to bring together every freely available piece of information we can find on a particular recruit -- reports from Scout, Rivals and ESPN, video, and news stories. (To that end, you'll start seeing these on our five current commits soon.)
I'm currently working on the next step of our coverage, which I plan to make live on the site on Monday. To move forward with this next step, though, we need more people than just the four writers for the site. Since Grady, Craig, Brian and I are generally focusing on writing -- and as you've seen lately, when our lives get busy, it's hard to even find time to do that as much as we'd like -- it's hard to find time to do some of this ancillary stuff I want to do. So, I'm looking for a team of people who want to get more involved with the site in a capacity that doesn't involve writing.
If this intrigues you, here's what we're looking for. In order of importance, members of this team ...
- Are passionate about recruiting. I'm not talking about the person who casually flips by Cougfan once a week to check it out. I'm talking about the person who obsessively hunts for information about guys we might/might not/should be interested in, who ponies up for that Cougfan subscription because you need to know every last shred of information about guys we might/might not/should be interested in, who does it because they believe that recruiting is the lifeblood of our programs. If you're not sure if that's you, chances are it's not. You people know who you are.
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Are committed to what we're doing. These people love the CougCenter community and want to see it grow. As such, they're not going to start on fire and then disappear for a month from the project. (Lack of new developments with recruiting notwithstanding.) This is a long-term deal where you're expected to be a contributing member of the team when your spare time permits.
- Know their way around a spreadsheet. This is pretty important because we're going to use Google Docs spreadsheets for this. However, if you don't know much about how to use them and are willing to teach yourself, that'll work too. We're not going to be doing complex stuff, so a basic understanding will do.
- Understand how to use basic coding. Or are willing to learn. We're not going to reprogram the world, but tagging links in Google Docs isn't a point-and-click thing, so there's a little computer savvy that needs to be present. If you learn computer concepts fairly quickly, you'll be fine.
That about covers it. I don't have a specific number of people I'm looking for; but if we can get, say, five or six people on this team (plus the writers), then when each of them do a little work on it when they have time, everything will be well covered.
If you're interested, shoot us an e-mail. We'll talk details.
EDIT: Just to clarify, this is not a huge time commitment. It's a little extra time to work on our recruiting stuff on top of the recruiting reading you already do.