intheteam In The News

Steve Wright Show (Radio 2) - 'Web Site of the Day' - 19th September 2000

"Whatever your sporting preference (football to fencing, tennis to tiddlywinks) In The Team offers club members the chance to create a website for their team. The service is free and you don't need any technical knowledge at all to create or update your site."

the net Magazine 'BRIGHT SPARKS' - July 2000

CLUB TOGETHER - Sports teams find a home

Among the dead pages littering cyberspace, the most irksome are those outdated sites for every sports team to have polished a boot. It's easy to start a site following a team's progress, but it soon becomes a chore to keep it updated - hence pages heralding 'forthcoming fixtures for 1997/98'.

The same thing happened to Paul Cripps's rugby team. Paul's brother had set up a site but quickly tired of spending every Sunday playing with FTP, and the site fell into disuse. However, it died so that others might live. A programmer for 13 years and a Web application developer for the last four, Paul had a project - and it wasn't just a new site for his rugger team......

'I thought I'd do something where anyone could go in and update it themselves without FTP' he explains. 'It wouldn't be too difficult to make it available to other rugby clubs. Then I thought, why just other rugby clubs?'

The result was intheteam.com, to which fans of all sorts of sports flocked to add their details. 'I put in a Crystal Palace on myself - I'm an armchair fan - to show people how to do it.' He needn't have bothered ; you need no technical knowledge to updat information, so any authorised team member can do it. 'Most people have got up and running really quickly. I don't know how many sports there are, but I'd have thought there's around 30. That was my inspiration.'

So did he spend long hours sweating away over a hot keyboard? Not really... 'It was something to do in my spare timeusing all the skills I use at work, but when you're developing an interesting application it inspires you far more to do it. I love sport, whereas if it was a dry insurance application it'd be a bit harder.

Kind words also spur Paul on. 'I got an email this morning saying, "I lovethe site, everyone I've showed it to is really impressed, keep going!". It gives you real motivation.

The effor is reciprocated by devotees: 'Some people are spending as much time improving their club pages as I am developing the site!'

There are already more than 100 teams represented and Paul reckons he's getting nearly 250 unique visitors each day - 'Not bad considering I haven't put in a lot of effort into promotion. But it's still early days yet and I'll be promoting in June, July and August, when everyone's keen to get their web sites up and running for the new season.'

Better brush up those Euro 2000 sites...

FourFourTwo Magazine - May 2000

BUILDING SITES

Things The Internet Can Make Infinitely Simple part 294. Any would be Webmaster who's tried to get their five-a-side/junior/Sunday League team online knows what a thankless task it can be.

Not only is the process of setting up a site frequently arduous and expensive, but you then need the time and inclination to update it each time you play. Enter www.sportsteam.co.uk*, with the brilliantly simple idea -build a site for your club within their site, free of charge, with no knowledge of Web Publishing.

Enter all the relevant details, and your player can access fixtures, contact details, statistics and a diary from their home or office. You can even email them all from the site to tell them where the next game is.

* www.sportsteam.co.uk is the former name of intheteam.com