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Coaches websites have become valuable recruiting tools

ATLANTA — Jerri Spurrier figured her technologically challenged husband would be the last sports celebrity with his very own Web site.

"He can work the phone — and that's about it," Steve Spurrier's wife said. "He doesn't know how to use a computer. And he doesn't want to know."

But that won't keep South Carolina's head ball coach from going where so many like him in college football have gone in recent years: to cyberspace, which might never be the same after this morning's expected launch of www.SpurrierHBC.com.

"Over the years I've been approached about doing one of these, but I just never got around to it," Spurrier said. "But this is a chance to go straight to the fans and show them some things about football they probably haven't seen before. I think it's going to be fun."

And profitable. Spurrier won't be his own webmaster or post his own blogs; that responsibility lies on Greenville, S.C.-based Champion Communications, which is charging about $10 a month to read the latest musings and other goodies from one of college football's most opinionated personalities. The company is shooting for 20,000 subscribers in the first 90 days.

"Whether you like him or you don't like him, people are always interested in what Coach Spurrier has to say," said Champion president Lawson Holland, who himself was a football coach for 28 years — nine with Spurrier — before going into private business. "We're cautious, but we're very optimistic."

Spurrier joins the growing list of college football coaches who've taken the Internet plunge. In the SEC, Florida's Urban Meyer, Tennessee's Phillip Fulmer and Arkansas's Houston Nutt already have their own sites. Georgia's Mark Richt is considering it but hasn't pulled the trigger, according to UGA spokesman Claude Felton. And later this year, Alabama fans will be able to log on to coachsaban.net, the official Internet home of Nick Saban.

So why do these coaches, who already put in long hours recruiting and preparing for Saturdays, invest precious time and energy into getting their names and faces onto the Internet?

Part of the motivation is that the sites give them the ability to go straight to their fans without the filter of the traditional media.

"We could see that the new generation of young people were going to get their information from the Internet," said Texas A&M coach Dennis Franchione, who launched www.coachfran.com when he took over at Alabama in 2001. "We could sit around and complain about it or be proactive. So we decided to reach out to the people who cared about our program and let them hear the information from the horse's mouth."

In some cases, the sites can generate revenue, as has been the case for Virginia Tech's Frank Beamer, Southern Cal's Pete Carroll and Ohio State's Jim Tressel. Spurrier said that more than half of the proceeds from his site will go to South Carolina's athletics department.

The sites can also serve as a clearinghouse for information about summer camps and other news about the program.

Then there's the obvious reason coaches get into the Web site business.

"It's all about recruiting," said Bill Little, the assistant athletics director at Texas.

Mack Brown is considered to be one of the best recruiters in college football. When he became head coach at Texas in 1998, Brown wanted a way to get as much information as possible about the Texas program directly to recruits and their families. So in 1999 Brown launched mackbrown-texasfootball.com, one of the first sites of its kind.

"Coaches are limited by rules in what they can send to recruits, as well as how they communicate with them," Little said. "Recruits are limited in their time on campus. The content of the site is driven by what would be of interest to potential recruits and their families."

Brown's site is also for Texas fans, who have supported it in droves. Last October, the month the Longhorns played rival Oklahoma, Brown's site drew 4.5 million hits, according to Little.

To a generation of football players who have grown up on the Internet, this is just the logical next step in the recruiting process.

"We get so much mail that you never get around to opening it," said Tyler King, a senior fullback from Buford, Ga. "[Coaches' sites are] a better way to find out what you need to know. It just makes sense. If you're trying to get younger players, you have to know that they are on the Internet all the time. They are comfortable surfing for the information they want."

Other athletics programs provide the same kind of information to recruits without attaching the name of their head coach to the site. Georgia Tech has playatgatech.com, a high-energy site with graphics and music that are geared specifically to recruits.

"Regardless of how you do it, the goal is the same," said Wayne Hogan, Georgia Tech's associate athletics director. "There are potential student-athletes out there who want to know about Georgia Tech football, and we want to get that information to them in the best way possible."

But these sites don't launch and maintain themselves. There's a lot of work involved, and at each school there are a number of people behind the scenes keeping the sites updated and running.

"If you do it right, it makes for some very long days and nights," said David Grim, who was responsible for the original launch of Tennessee's phillipfulmer.com. "If you're going to get fans and recruits to come to the site, you have to give them unique content. We would try to get audio and video highlights on our site right after the games.

"It was a lot of work, but our fans loved it."

Tony Barnhart writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.