It’s hard to believe the fall sports season is just around the corner. While the basketball and baseball seasons ended just a few months ago, other sports are ready to hit the turf (or gym) at the University of Dayton. UDPride has been busy over the summer preparing for this, and we hope you like what’s in store.

As you know, UDPride works hard to celebrate the accomplishments of many sports and many athletes. While years prior were concentrated solely on mens basketball, the reception over the last year and a half has been outstanding as we’ve broadened our coverage and brought you more stories about the other athletes you should know about. We were initially hesitant at first, but the more stories we published, the more fans asked for. It’s given us a sincere satisfaction to bring some of the lesser-known players, coaches, and personalities to the forefront — many of whom deserve the attention but have somehow fallen through the cracks of the local print and television media. As it turns out, most of the stories you’ll find on UDPride simply can’t be found anywhere else.

We’re extremely excited about what’s in store for 2001-02. With the cooperation of many people (too many to name), we’re set to bring you closer to the UD players and coaches than ever before. New to UDPride this year are two sections titled “Player Diaries” and Coaches Corner”.

We’ve lined up athletes in several Tier-1 sports to contribute to our site in a season-long journal to document and share their insights on college athletics, academic pressures, personal goals and struggles, and the thrills and agonies of victory and defeat. Each athlete will contribute one diary entry every two weeks throughout their sports season in a format and direction of their own choosing. Each one is destined to be different and we hope you’ll enjoy getting to know your Flyer athletes better than you ever have before.

Going a step further, most of the Tier-1 coaches at the Univ. Dayton have agreed to a series of Q&As, quick hitters, season updates, and strategy sessions over the course of their respective season. Look for two or three contributions from each contributing coach as they take you behind-the-scenes and fill you in on what would otherwise go untold!

Of course, interviews and features will supplement these sections throughout the season, along with complete game coverage of every UD mens and womens soccer home game and selective UD mens basketball game recaps. You’ll notice a reduction in basketball recaps for two reasons. First, the Web has become a saturated market for postgame stories on basketball games. Once a niche of UDPride, most Internet outlets now provide the same information and are making the content rather redundant. Second, fans like yourself have become more Internet savvy, and it’s not long after a game ends that fans will check ESPN, CNN, Sportsline, the Dayton Daily News online site, and the opposing school’s hometown paper for an impartial account of the game. While none of them give a true Flyer fan’s perspective, most of the information is similar and due to time limitations on our part, we felt our efforts were best served by providing proprietary information no one else offers. That’s why we’ve worked especially hard at bringing you closer to the very players and coaches you root for. We feel it’s a fair tradeoff.

As many fans have already found, the UDPride Message Board is the place to post your comments and talk it up with other Flyer fans on the Internet. We upgraded our message board software in the spring and registrations have exceeded all of our expectations, passing the 200 member mark just days ago. While registration is not required to read the threads, it is required to post on the board and helps keep the conversations clean and mature. So far, the discussions have been top shelf and we hope it flourishes as the sports season unfolds.

Staff writer Doug Lyons, known as one of the smartest Xs and Os Flyer fans around, has developed an exclusive formula for evaluating team strength in mens basketball. Based on the theories of the RPI, the “UDPride Power Rankings” is our attempt to right the wrongs in the RPI algorithms and develop a better system for measuring basketball rankings of all Division I-A member schools. It’s our first attempt at such an endeavor and we’re just as anxious as you are to see if we hit the bullseye and sink like a rock.

While recruiting has never been our bread and butter, we may offer a few pieces about the recruiting process and how the Univ. Dayton is meeting those challenges throughout the season. In terms of player speculation and recruiting gossip on the pursuit of the next Hoops Malone, we’ll leave that to other sources.
We’re pleased to add three contributing writers to the UDPride staff this year. First is Sean Hargadon, a UD graduate who works in the university’s publications office and brings writing experience from the Flyer News and the Univ. Dayton Quarterly. Second is Jim Meadows, known by the handle “Swampy” to many UD fans. Jim contributed stories last year to Flyerhoops.com and asked us for a similar chance this year. We’re happy to have him and look forward to his witty submissions. Bill Kintner, known as “CigarBoy” on RaiderRoundball.com, works hard at interviewing coaches and players throughout the East and Midwest, and we’ll have publishing rights to his stories that interest Flyer fans. Future Kintner interviews in the works are with Bruiser Flint and Thad Matta among others. Kintner recently interviewed St. Joseph’s Head Coach Phil Martelli.

On the design front, you’ll notice a better layout, more vibrant school colors, cool Web effects, and a more professional approach to Web development. Everything you see is done in-house by trial-and-error, and trust us when we say there were a lot of errors before getting it right. For a bunch of amateurs however, we like the improvements. Please keep in mind that this site has been designed exclusively for MS Internet Explorer 5.x or above. Netscape has and continues to distill bad code in their browsers — making HTML rendering on a Netscape browser rather arduous. Netscape 6.0 is supposed to adhere to the W3C standard for HTML, but in testing, we found even it was plagued by various problems or script compatibility issues. Click on the “viewing this site” link at the bottom of this page for more information.

There is more that could be said, but we’ll leave it to you to fill in the rest of the blanks. Browse the site and experience it for yourself. Part of something new is pilfering through the corners and uncovering things on your own. We hope you’ll be satisfied, we think you’ll be satisfied. Some parts of the site are still a work in progress, and we hope to have everything completed as soon as possible.

Were it not for fans like yourself, we wouldn’t work so hard. UDPride is made up of average fans like yourself with a love for UD athletics. The amount of time and energy involved to pull a site such as this off is sometimes overwhelming. Long nights, short weekends, and pit-stop dinners are common. If you like what we’re doing, drop a note to anyone on the staff to re-encourage us and keep our spirits fresh.