While Tufts' Information Technology Services (ITS) played a large role in overhauling the design of the Tufts athletics Web site, the site's day-to-day upkeep remains under the control of the athletics department.
"The Web site is a 40-hour job within itself, just updating it and keeping it up to speed," Sports Information Director Paul Sweeney said. "That's how it's done nowadays at every level - Div. I, Div. II, Div. III."
It wasn't always that way. When Sweeney first arrived at Tufts in 1993, the Tufts athletics Web site was still six years away, and local newspapers played a much larger role in the delivery of sports news at Tufts. Today, the Internet is the primary tool for providing news, scores, statistics, and information to recruits.
The Internet's rise has been something of a double-edged sword, however. Within the last year, the Boston Globe - the area's highest-circulating newspaper - stopped printing game summaries for Tufts and other local Div. III sports. While Tufts sports scores are still printed, along with the occasional few sentences on a particular Jumbos team, this evolution in the print media has made it even more crucial to keep the Web site up to date.
"My constituency, for lack of a better word, is really the parents, the alumni ... the general student body, and the Daily," Sweeney said. "And that's really the most important thing I do: keeping the athletics Web site updated for those people who care about it."
"The Web site has become a very significant aspect of our department," Athletic Director Bill Gehling said in an e-mail to the Daily. "It is often the first impression that prospective students get of our program. It is also the best way for friends and alums of Tufts athletics to keep current on what's happening."
As Gehling hinted, the athletics Web site plays a pivotal role in recruiting. Each team's section of the Web site has a recruiting form for perspective student-athletes to fill out, along with background information on the team. It is the hope among athletics personnel that the Web site's new design will continue to attract high-quality student-athletes.
"I think that when a kid visits [the Web site] he can see that athletics at Tufts means something because they have a site that not only looks good, but it's updated every day, and it's got a lot of good information on it," Sweeney said.
"It's kind of like having my own little daily newspaper where I'm putting news up on a daily basis," he continued. "I think it looks as good as any site that's out there now. The information has always been there, but now the look has caught up with that part of it."
While the Web site's upkeep is certainly a time-consuming endeavor, Sweeney's role is also to compile much of the site's information. That means keeping statistics at games and writing summaries of those games and events, not to mention making programs and coordinating public address announcers at the home games.
In addition to writing game summaries, Sweeney also writes press releases for Tufts athletes' achievements on and off the court. While Boston newspapers might have moved away from Div. III coverage, press releases like these are sent to local newspapers where the student-athletes attended high school. Such was the case when men's basketball senior co-captain David Shepherd was selected to ESPN The Magazine's Academic All-District First Team on Feb. 8 and women's basketball senior Valerie Krah broke the Tufts career three-point shooting record on Feb. 2.
Publicizing Tufts student-athletes' achievements is something in which Sweeney takes pride.
"Unfortunately, I don't spend enough time on the publicity aspect of it because there's just so much to do day-by-day," Sweeney said. "A Div. I [sports information director] will have, I don't know, six people in his office ... At this level, it doesn't happen that way."
Sweeney actually underestimated the size of Div. I sports information staffs. At Boston College, which participates in the highly competitive Atlantic Coast Conference, the media relations department has four full-time employees, one secretary and three interns, according to its athletic Web site. Div. I Boston University and Harvard list seven and eight athletic publicity employees, respectively, on their sites. The University of Texas at Austin, one of the most successful Div. I athletics programs in the nation, has a whopping 25 athletics communications employees, according to its Web site.
Conversely, at Tufts, with the exception of the intramurals section of the Web site, which is maintained by softball coach and Intramurals Director Cheryl Milligan, every update to the athletics Web site is Sweeney's work. While in the past he has had part-time student workers on his staff, he is currently a one-man show, and Tufts' athletics staff has certainly taken notice.
"I think our sports information operation is second to none in NESCAC," Gehling said. "Paul Sweeney does an absolutely awesome job. He takes great pride in his work and refuses to take short cuts when it would be easy to do."
Still, despite the Web site's improvements and success, there exists the constant desire to continue making advances.
"You always want to try to get better," Sweeney said. "I would like to get to a point where I feel like I can do more of the actual publicizing of our teams, our athletes and our coaches.
"You do get bogged down doing a lot of the day-by-day stuff, and there's so many great stories among athletes at Tufts, not just what they're doing on the court, but what they do off the court and how well they do academically, and what they're doing in activities completely unrelated to athletics," Sweeney continued. "And that's the interesting stuff that I'd love to do better at getting out there."
