A year ago, I wrote about how this site was rated as the No. 4 field hockey site in the world by FeedSpot.
This year, the site is ranked No. 2, behind Longstreth’s The Scoop.
I don’t know how this happened; all we do is wake up every day and try to come up with topics of conversation within the field hockey and girls/women’s lacrosse communities. With just a touch of other women’s sports just to add some perspective.
So, let me own up to one thing I did a few years ago to see if the site would get more views (or “hits” in the parlance of the day) just by writing about a particular topic or person. I wrote an opinion piece about tennis player Anna Kournikova, who had gotten a lot of attention in the Internet age because of her model-esque looks rather than how she played.
Kournikova, to her credit, won two Grand Slam titles. But they were in doubles. In her singles career, she was a solid player who somehow reached the No. 8 final ranking in 2000, but throughout her major tournament career, did not win a singles title in 62 tournaments.
The opinion piece literally doubled the number of hits on our old Geocities site. Which made me wonder if I could simply embed the word “Kournikova” in our field hockey stories just to get attention. But we’ve seen the Internet universe frown on things like that, especially as the universe of content pretty much drowns out the attempt.
I like to think that our blog presence, as well as the stories and numbers linked to it, have a certain degree of integrity. We dig for sources, look for trends, and listen carefully to the world around us.
One thing that I have tried not to do in the last few years is to overhype younger players without seeing them. I knew, for example, about what Lexi Smith was doing in middle school with indoor field hockey. She eventually broke the national record for goals scored in a scholastic field hockey career.
A few years later, I saw what Austyn Cuneo was doing at Voorhees Eastern (N.J.) with the numbers she had amassed. And there have been plenty of other players who went on to do great things at the next level — Meredith Sholder, Phia Gladieux, Mackenzie Allessie, Shannon Taylor, Ryleigh Heck, Chloe Humphrey, Marie McCool, and Taylor Cummings have represented our country in their respective athletic endeavors. I have seen all of these, and more, in the course of our 27 years of building this Web presence.
With all of these, I have also seen stories of the dark side of the sport. I have seen more than one good player flunk out of college. I have seen nearly 30 coaches run afoul of the law, including a tabloid-level case involving murder and a manhunt that took authorities to Europe.
We’ve also seen more than our fair share of coaches who, through no fault of their own, are drummed out of their scholastic coaching positions by school boards or other officials.
This site endeavors to find the truth in all of these stories, even if it takes years for me to do so. It’s not about rankings.