Promoting Your Team

[Gregg Pathiakis]

To go along with Sonny's how-to-run a team ideas, I thought I would add this topic. This is what I send to all the teams in my own conference. I'm sure people have other ideas as well. I apologize for this being a bit PCLL-centric, but you get the idea.

With the Division A and B both having a national and conference playoff structure for the first time this year, it's a great time for teams to start promoting themselves. Here are just a few popular ideas.

Game Articles
These are becoming more of a given for teams around the country. It happens after every one of their games. Most teams can find someone on their team that writes for their school newspaper or has experience writing articles. Just make sure the article isn't overly biased towards your own team. If you would rather just write a press release (game notes) after the game (just the facts of the game), those are fine too. E-mail me your story or release and I will get them published on the PCLL website as well as USLIA.com. Dan Morris will also be covering some of the bigger games this season.

Special Interest Stories
These can be about anything. Players who have overcome difficulties, player with an unusual major, coach who played D-1 lacrosse, etc., etc. These also can be in the form of a press release, usually done more in this fashion if it is a big story (for example, player receives national academic honors, player receives All-American Honors in another sport). Again, these will be published on both sites.

Game Pictures
First, make sure you are taking picturse with a digital camera (or get them developed onto digital media). Second, make sure the pictures are of ok quality. Third, is you have a parent taking pictures, don't both sending them to me if they're all of her son (son picking up a ground ball, son giving a high-five, son drinking Gatorade, son warming up... it gets old). These will, again, be published on both website. Contact me to find out how to send them to me. Another bonus with these is that if the two championship teams have enough regular season pictures, I will produce a DVD for the teams (similar to Patriots and Red Sox championship DVDs) and sell them to teams and family and friends.

USLIA.com Message Board
Other than checking game results, this is by far the most popular research voters do when picking their Top 25. Tim Gray does a great job moderating the PCLL board and keeps us up to date on scores. Chime in there with a brief recap of the game.

USLIA.com Game Reports
Submitting your stats on the PCLL site is mandatory, but the USLIA.com site is just as important so that voters can completely research your team. Contact me if you don't know how to do this. If you are not putting your stats in the USLIA website, at the VERY LEAST, but in your home schedule. If you do not put in your home schedule, you opponents for these games can not put in their own stats for those games.

These are just some of the ideas I have off the top of my head. If you have others, respond to my thread regarding this on the message board.

And finally, good luck to all teams this season!

[Gregg Pathiakis]

A couple additions I have already thought of:

Website
Make sure your team has a fully-functional website. Make sure it is comprehensive. The PCLL and USLIA websites can only supply so much information.

School Newspapers
While Google-ing the PCLL, I came across numerous school newspapers online that wrote stories about PCLL teams. While these stories may not make it onto USLIA.com (that's Sonny's call), they can be published on the PCLL site. Just tell me about them.