Nothin’ but ‘Net

By Mark Gignac
Inside Carolina
February 1996

 

The Tar Heels catch a ride on the information superhighway.

Direct television satellite hookups that bring more sports than one fan can handle to your home. Surround sound speakers, so you can hear the thunderous dunks, bone-shattering hits or the crack of the bat as Ken Griffey Jr. takes one deep. Technology has become the friend of the avid sports fan, and those who have access to the World Wide Web (WWW) can be spoiled by another treat.

Want to see Shammond Williams’s three point shooting percentage for the season? Feel like telling Vince Carter that in the vast wisdom of your basketball knowledge, you think he should get to play more? The technology of the WWW. And the creativity of some Carolina basketball players under the supervision of a sophomore business major at UNC named Seth Fleishman have helped set a new trend in sports: interaction with the athletes.

This year, UNC decided to let students set up their own web pages through their email accounts. Fleishman, a friend of Williams, taught himself how to use Hyper Text Markup Language, the computer jargon used to make web pages. Looking for something innovative, Fleishman got together with Williams and they decided to make a web page called Shammond's World.

"We wanted to do something new and different, and no other college players that we knew of had web pages," Fleishman said.

Shammond's World, located at http://www.unc.edu/~swillia2/, contains some pictures of Williams and teammates at the Dean Dome, a link to an interview page, and the ever popular Shammond Stories, a couple samples of his heroic efforts in every day life. Links are also available to Carolina athletics page and a statistics page. "The web page is just a hobby," Williams said. "I'm not trying to make publicity for myself; it's just a great thing to have, and the fan response has been great."

Once they created the world, the next step was to publicize it. Fleishman emailed sports web pages and posted the Universal Resource Locator (URL) to news groups all over the WWW. The other sports web pages added links to Shammond's World, and its popularity took off. Just as fans around the world were getting to see Williams’s page, so was Vince Carter's high school coach, who promptly recommended that Vince create one also. Carter contacted Fleishman and Vince's Court (http://www.unc.edu/~carter15/) was under construction. Fleishman named the web sites of the Tar Heel players The Blue Heaven Pages, and Yahoo, a famous search engine for browsing the web, has added the Blue Heaven pages to its list of basketball sites under a separate new category for players.

Currently Williams and Carter are the only players in Yahoo's new category, but two new names are certain to join them. Antawn Jamison and Ademola Okulaja will also put up web sites under the direction of Fleishman, who said they should be done by March.

"I will do Ademola's and Antawn's simultaneously, but they will be running on the WWW before completion so people can see the progress," Fleishman said.

All the Blue Heaven Pages will have some degree of uniformity, each containing pictures, stats and interviews. However, each page will have its own uniqueness exemplified by Carter's link to track and field world records and William's link to his stories. Of course, all of the Blue Heaven Pages will be inter-linked, and new additions will come this summer when Fleishman and the players come up with new ideas. Probably the best thing about the pages is that fans can email the athlete and each page contains an address to send paraphernalia for autographs. Though Carter and Williams are extremely busy with school and basketball, when they have time, they try to answer a lot of their email. This direct link from fans to players is unparalleled in sports history. In a letter written to readers of the pages, Fleishman reviewed the history of this phenomenon and adds the best reason for the pages:

"Shammond Williams is one of my best friends, and I thought people should be able to get to know the basketball players, especially Shammond, because they are interesting guys who are not just basketball players who appear on a court a couple hours every few days."

Often times, we as sports fans admire the ability of athletes and forget they are humans, capable of emotions of sadness, happiness, heartache, love, pain and pride. We see the arrogance of Deion Sanders talking on the field or the greed of Alonzo Mourning asking for $13 million a year and throw our hands in the air believing all athletes are the same. The plain truth is they are not, but we could never get to know them to find out who they are.

Fleishman and his Tar Heel basketball friends have found an easy way for the fans to know their heroes, who they are off the court and television interviews. This link bypasses the media, dodging the path of the unintentional biases of the sports writer or television commentator. These creative players with the help of a gifted friend have brought the sports fan interaction with athletes, a legacy that may be more profound and longer lasting than any they could leave on the basketball court.