The North Carolina Tar Heels may not be the top-ranked team in our College Hoops Insider preseason poll, but there can’t be much doubt they’re #1 when it comes to World Wide Web sites. First, there’s the official web page of the UNC Athletic Department, certainly a quality effort in an increasingly competitive field. Then there’s Goheels.com, a commercial concern which maintains a close relationship with the university. Still need more? Try Dave Chen’s page, an exhaustive list of links to Tar Heel information. But it’s the “Blue Heaven Pages” that make following North Carolina basketball on the web truly unique. These pages, maintained by UNC student Seth Fleishman, are the official web sites for five Tar Heel players: Shammond Williams, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Ademola Okulaja, and Makhtar Ndiaye. Other than a page done by former Northwestern player Dan Kreft, these are the only pages Fleishman knows of that have ever been controlled by players themselves. Fleishman is a senior Business Administration major who began the project with Williams’ page two years ago. The two had become friends the previous year when Fleishman moved into the basketball residence hall. “On my first night there, Shammond walked into my room, introduced himself, and invited me to dinner,” Seth says. Soon after, Fleishman taught himself the web programming language called HTML by visiting various web pages and seeing how they were coded. The friendship and newfound skill then merged when he offered to make a page for Williams. It wasn’t long before the new page gained some local media attention, and the other players were asking for pages, too. From the start, it has been Fleishman’s job to do all the HTML, but the rest of the responsibility for the Blue Heaven Pages lies in the hands of the players. Seth says he makes suggestions which are almost always accepted, but “the players have the final say as to what is or isn’t on the pages.” Each of the pages has brief bios, annual preseason interviews, statistics, and pictures. Fleishman says he hopes to have the 1997-98 interviews posted before all the exhibition games have been played. As for updating statistics during the season, he says there is no set schedule; it could be anywhere from immediately after games to every few weeks. Statistics are available elsewhere on the web, though. These pages are special for other reasons. For example, they provide an opportunity to e-mail the players, although Fleishman admits response varies. “Some write everyone back, and others write only a few,” he says. The pages also let visitors request autographs through the athletic department, which Fleishman thinks, “is fairly dependable, but I don’t know how timely.” Each of the pages has its own unique feature as well. The most notable of these has to be the “stories” section of Shammond Williams’ page. Basically, the stories listed make Williams look like some sort of superhero. “Shammond’s stories are 100% fabricated,” according to Fleishman, “Shammond used to tell some wacked out stories and jokes, so my roommate from sophomore year and I based them on those.” Regardless, they are quite funny and a must see. Despite his impressive web experience, which also includes working for the Goheels.com site, Fleishman would prefer to be either a sports agent or a stockbroker when he graduates in May. Until then, he’ll be concentrating on his schoolwork and updating the five Blue Heaven pages, though he might also create a sixth for Ed Cota. Cota has asked several times, but Seth says that since each page requires a significant time commitment, “it would take a lot of e-mail requests for me to go through the trouble of doing another.”