Chicagoball.com one year anniversary
CHICAGOBALL.COM - Monday August 7th will mark the one year anniversary for Chicagoball.com. Chicagoball.com started as a one page website to host The Runs team stats and quickly changed into the host of the Riverside fall league website. With 5 out of 7 teams using the site to put up stats, a lot of softball player and fans invovled in the league raved about how great the site can be with all the scorecards from each game entered into the website. During the fall of 2005, the site rountinely received 90-120 visitors per day with an average of 500-900 page hits per day.
Over the winter, the bulk of the site was created. The simple idea behind the site was that the league manager would log into the site and enter the schedule and the scores and someone from each team would log in and enter the results of each at-bat on the scorecard. The website would then do the rest by adding up all the stats and displaying all the different pages. New features and pages were added to the site with the goal of becoming an ESPN.com style website for Chicago softball tournaments, leagues, teams, and players. Currently, 12 leagues use the website with about 15 teams logging in to the website to enter the scorebooks. The site had a record 49,960 page hits in June which was helped by an average of 6,500 page hits per day during the North-South tournament. To date the site has had 151,870 page hits which is an average of almost 20,000 page hits per month during the softball season.
Going forward we want to grow upon the success we have had the first year. We are looking for suggestions and comments to help make the site better. We would like to get more involvement from leagues and players to get more scorecards entered into the site. Starting next season, we would like to get sponsors to pay for scorekeepers to get out to the games and keep the scorebook and enter the scorecards into the website so that we can have complete box scores, game recaps, team, player, and leagues for every game in all of the involved leagues in the Chicagoland area.