Can Youth Sports Coverage Pay Off Online?
Local Start-Ups, Traditional Media Vie for Ad Dollars

By Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 3, 2007

On a cold Friday night last month, Lem Satterfield staked out his spot on the sidelines to cover a championship football game between two Maryland private schools.

The former Baltimore Sun sportswriter scribbled play-by-play notes and interviewed athletes and coaches, as he had done so many times in the past.

But this time -- instead of just writing one story -- he posted an article and photo on the Web at halftime and wrote more updates after the game. He even brought along two top high school football players in the region to serve as commentators for an online video report about the contest.

Satterfield is a reporter and editor for DigitalSports, an Internet upstart based in Columbia that hopes to wring profits from youth, club and high school sports. The company is part of a crowded field of newspapers, television stations and Web-based competitors with the same goal, all touting their comprehensive, multimedia-rich offerings.

The result has been a mini-boom in local sports coverage.

"This is what I want to do," said Satterfield, a nearly 20-year veteran of the Sun who said he enjoys the freedom of working on the Web. At the newspaper, he said, "I understand space and time are constrained."

Venture capital-backed DigitalSports offers a glimpse of how one company is going after the market. It is trying to combine the power of a national Web site, with a central system for managing content, and the speed and knowledge of local advertising sales staffs and editors. Leagues, teams, schools and states have their own pages on the site.

Chief executive Ed Kelley, who previously co-founded the big oil-change company Jiffy Lube, calls the strategy the "media entrepreneurial model."

DigitalSports's content comes from a mix of journalists who have left big media companies, including The Washington Post, and novices, as well as coaches, players and parents. Its full-fledged multimedia model has been deployed in a handful of places, including the Washington area. In most places around the country, its sites are just a compilation of stats and schedules provided by coaches, or nothing at all.

Some pages are much more polished than others; the site still shows signs of being a work in progress. The most mature features include a carousel of rotating content -- including videos, photos, blogs, headlines and resource centers, with information about training and other topics.

DigitalSports is the 63rd most popular sports site on the Internet, with 257,000 unique visitors in October, according to ComScore Media Metrix. That's compared with about 1.5 million visits per month for each of the leading high school sports Web sites, http://highschoolsports.net and http://maxpreps.com. Some wonder whether the potential audience for local sports will ever be big enough.

"The interest in some of these sports at the local level is marginal," said Kip Cassino, vice president for research at Borrell Associates. "It's basically down to the number of family members associated with the team."

Those family members can be loyal.

"I just check that site almost every day to see if they have new highlights," said Peter Athens of Dunkirk, 16, the quarterback on the St. Mary's Saints.

His father, Art Athens, who works for the Naval Academy, checks the site's videos after each game. "If I wanted to be inspired by my son's play, I would watch it again," he said.

To make money, DigitalSports primarily sells advertising. But in contrast to most online companies -- which focus on gathering as much of a national audience as possible to get big advertisers -- DigitalSports wants to crack the local advertising market.

For instance, on the Northern Virginia section of the site, a plumbing company and a copy and printing company have ads.

"The rub for me is: How do we get in front of a lot of high schools and booster clubs at a really targeted micro level?" said Peter Beveridge, owner of Eyeblack, a company that provides anti-glare strips with logos.

Chasing Advertising

Local ad dollars make up 13.4 percent of total online spending, according to research firm eMarketer. The company estimates that local online advertising, a $2.9 billion market, will grow to $7.8 billion in the next four years.

Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, assistant managing editor for sports at The Post, said some newspapers have assigned multiple reporters to cover single schools, without reaping much financial gain.

"I would question their ability to come up with a financial model," he said. "High school sports has been a loss leader forever."

That hasn't stopped many newspapers from beefing up their local sports presence.

Tim Wheatley, assistant managing editor for sports at the Sun, said among his paper's offerings now include a weekly two-page spread dedicated to high school sports and a new product called MyTeam, released by parent Tribune Co., that will try to offer team-by-team, school-by-school coverage.

The Post also has stepped up coverage. At its new LoudounExtra Web site serving Loudoun County, The Post is offering video coverage of games, a sports blog and galleries of photos.

"We're going to try to own the hyperlocal space," Garcia-Ruiz said.

Garcia-Ruiz and Wheatley also are convinced that newspapers will be the destination of choice for most sports readers. Papers often double-check statistics and track down scores when teams forget to phone them in.

"We have the benefit of expertise," Wheatley said.

But some are skeptical that newspapers will be able to continue to dominate youth sports coverage. The upstarts may be more nimble. Traditional media companies "realize they have to do something different, and they're not sure how to get there," said Brad Schultz, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi and the editor of the Journal of Sports Media.

Refining Efforts

Since the late 1990s, several new-media companies have targeted youth sports, with some 20,000 high schools nationwide. One early company, SportsHuddle, got the attention of many newspapers with its promise to compile school statistics. But it ran into early trouble and many editors felt burned in the process.

Newer companies have been more successful. HighSchoolSports.net is based on software called Schedule Star that enables school officials to keep track of schedules. It feeds that data to the High School Sports site. In October, McLean-based Gannett, the nation's biggest newspaper publisher, bought the company for an undisclosed sum.

In the spring, MaxPreps, which says it has statistics and schedules for 20,000 teams, was bought by CBS for $43 million. Also in the spring, Yahoo bought Rivals.com, a subscription sports site focused on recruiting.

Smaller operations also exist.

Dan Sousa launched Loudoun Prep Sports two years ago. Today, the site gets some 10,000 unique visitors per month. His advertising, which includes banners from the local swim team and steak shop, is sufficient to pay him full time.

"I'm on duty and working 24 hours a day," he said. "I really can't go out to dinner without running into an assistant high school coach."

The DigitalSports of the world also must compete with outlets that are trying to exploit even smaller niches. In Alexandria, Thomas Jefferson High School cross country coach Matt Ryan said he checks http://milestat.com, not DigitalSports. MileStat is run by a former Virginia track athlete.

"He's kind of pursuing his own passion," Ryan said. "It's that niche."

Avoiding Criticism

DigitalSports was one of several high school sports companies floundering in 2005 when Ed Kelley joined.

A onetime football player and coach, he saw a chance to provide more than statistics.

For 18 months, he traveled around the country talking to coaches, athletic directors and others involved in sports. He concluded DigitalSports should leave articles about the hyper-competitive world of recruiting and controversies to other outlets.

"Saying anything negative about anybody is a termination event," he said. "We're trying to put a protective umbrella over youth sports."

DigitalSports has received venture capital funding from, among others, Bethesda's Novak Biddle, which would describe the investment only as in the middle seven figures. Top executives from Advertising.com also joined the company.

New media or old media, Satterfield, the former Sun reporter, said he feels the emotion of the kids on the field just the same.

At the football championship that Friday night, long after the stadium lights had been shut down and the postgame quiet had settled in, Satterfield was clicking away on his laptop.

A few feet away, his friend Sun reporter Pat O'Malley, whose colleagues call him the "pope" of high school sportswriters, was rushing to meet deadline. "Not enough time," O'Malley said as he sent in the 391-word piece, destined for Page C9.

Satterfield felt no such consternation. He first posted a summary story. "People will be logging on," he said. But then past midnight he polished it, writing a more dramatic opening and longer narrative, topping it off at more than 1,000 words.