LongBlackLine

Figure of speech. Ive know for some time there are no polls for NIC COY and All Conference as you claimed. You were full of baloney the whole time. For what reason, I have no idea.

Well you're wrong, I've participated in them myself. It's really not germane to the discussion, but your fixation over incidental details, while befuddling, is also amusing. Sorry your attempt at a "gotcha" moment fell flat, puddin' head.

No luck.

Luck isn't requisite in successfully using a search function. Keep trying.

The site would still flourish because we have many other features. Take away the messageboard from the GID and you have NOTHING.

 

We would still be getting around 4-5million page views without a messageboard. Chad Red's profile alone has been viewed 18,000 times along with Blake Rypel and Nick Lee's both around 8,000 times in about a year and a half.

But weren't ~10k of those of those views Chad and his dad?

No polls for either POY or all conference at the first two Google links. If you could provide the actual link where you find the POY and/or All Conference poll for the NIC or any conference for that matter, I would appreciate it.

Add "polls" to the search query. I think voting is closed now though.

The topics I follow have died off considerably over the past 5 years, those are usually NE Indiana based. I know one that used to be quite fun, the NECC is nothing but the same person posting over and over again.

 

Once again, this website is more than a messageboard, the only thing to compare to the GID is a messageboard. We have users that put in 2500+ dual results a year. We have users that update team and individual profiles. When you search wrestlers like Chad Red, Shawn Streck, etc one of the first pages you get is their IndianaMat profile. When you search Indiana football or Indiana high school football the GID is either not on the first page or very low. We are recognized both in state and nationally by media personnel from newspapers to big time websites. We also have a very prominent following on social media. Even for a lowly sport like wrestling we have 10x, yes TEN TIMES more followers on Facebook.

 

Comparing messageboard activity is fine, but we are way more than a messageboard and have been since day numero uno. We cover the sport on many different fronts and to compare this website to a messageboard is borderline hysterical.

Turn off the message board and see what happens.

The NCAA limits wrestling programs at 9.9 athletic scholarships. With 10 weight classes, that means no schools can possibly give their whole roster full rides. International corruption played a bigger role in wrestling almost getting dropped from the Olympics rather than my paranoid/isolationist view that people who know wrestling should make decisions about wrestling.

 

I have no involvement with football. I'm not going to go to Gridiron Digest and tell them how they should try to get Sectionals seeded and fix the success multiplier. They would call me an idiot and tell me that they are working on it.

 

But thank you, LongBlackLine and casualwrestlingfan. You have managed to bring together some members here who were disagreeing about other topics.

I think you'd find some sympathetic ears (keyboards).

Still looking for the NIC player of the year and all conference poll you referenced.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=NIC+all+conference+%2B+gridiron+digest

The point was that many of those conference topics have posts that just report the score or scores of games. To me that is fluff as we don't have that here due to our results area. Our number of posts have gone down by about 1500-2000 just due to lack of those posts on the new site. We are getting closer to everyone reporting results since we upgraded the website. Obviously it is much easier for football as the media coverage is much greater.

That's just wildly inaccurate. Discussion and debate drive those thread/post numbers. There is a weekly scores thread pinned at the top every week, but the vast majority of threads and underlying posts go well beyond just who won.

This is kind of a silly debate to have because I don't think anyone is under the impression wrestling is more popular than football at the high school level.

The disparity stands to reason, but another interesting comparison to gauge activity/participation would be to look at post counts and years active since account registration. The GID has hundreds of users with well over 1k posts and hundreds more that have been active for 5+ years. I'd be curious to know how many IM has comparably?

Joe,

 

The traffic you get on here is great. There's no need to increase it just for the sake of increasing it. The site is easy enough to find for those who are interested in finding it. Your members are knowledgeable and passionate about wrestling. I don't think most of us want football fans coming here trying to solve all our problems like we are clueless about our own sport.

This kind of paranoia is why wrestling is a dying sport. It's why colleges offer fractional scholarships or financial merit based money instead of full rides for an entire roster. It's why the Olympics almost dropped the (one of?) oldest sport in the games. You should be engaging as many people as you can. Now is a particularly good time with all the bad coverage surrounding football and CTE. Wrestling is a great sport with a lot of ancillary benefits, promote it. Save the isolationism attitude for Trump rallies.

Do you have their analytics? I'd be interested to see how close we are. Just going off their content they have about 1000 new topics over the last year. We have over 1000 just since last October.

 

We average 8-10 million pageviews a year, with over 200,000 unique visitors.

 

If you are a wrestling fan trying to find information about Indiana wrestling you will use google more than a football messageboard. We probably get more traffic from Steve Brook's Indy Star article mentions than we would from the GID.

I can ask.

Topics don't mean much. A lot of the topics on here are weekly camp "advertisements" or have 1-2, a small handful of responses. They're not real discussions. There are topics on the GID that go on for hundreds of pages and last a year before new ones are started for the sake of loading speeds.

From what I have seen the GID isn't growing. Many of the former good content creators are posting less or not at all. The impact we have on social media is also very hard to gauge for users without access to our analytics.

I feel like your debating the valuation of your company compared to the GID. I don't care about the appliances or granite counters in your house, I care about the land it's built on and what makes it valuable; location.

You're commenting on perceived quality of discussion, "content", activity as a sign of growth... growth is merely a quantifiable number... unique visitors/hits, registered/active users, and the resulting strain put on their servers.

The fact remains football draws superior views/numbers. Having been on these sites for twenty years now all of the content, discussions, debates seem rote to me. The community and the interest in the sport keep people engaged. I'm simply of the opinion that if your goal is to grow and promote the sport of wrestling in Indiana, you could do worse than attracting crossover interest from the GID, even if it's minimal.

If you couldn't find this site before this year, I'm not sure what to tell you. If you Google Indiana wrestling we are results 4, 5, and 6 behind the ISWA, IU wrestling, and the IHSAA. If you Google Indiana wrestling rankings we are the top two results.

I also think you underestimate your impact. I can keep my yard in order, but my wife makes it look like something off the cover of Home & Garden. You add a lot of shine to your site via content, but if you took away the forum, I'd bet your numbers would drop dramatically. The GID kept growing even without the content driven by TA. So when people say "just a forum", they're really missing out on the key drivers for sites like these. The forum, and the community within, is the site.

 

There is no question we provide a good amount of staff content, but don't forget that results are very much user generated. You would be very surprised at how much traffic we get especially from outside of Indiana. Our social media presence is very strong with more Twitter followers, even 10X more on Facebook and then a good following on Instagram. We reach a lot broader age group and types of people from fans, coaches, athletes, and media. We are constantly documented in local news articles both print and TV.

 

We have a model here that is much more friendly to long term sustainability. The GID threatens each year to close their doors, while we have never come close to it.

 

The Football Digest and Griddy's have no association with the GID from what I can tell. Before Tim Adams passed they had articles and interviews and that would have been a good comparison to IndianaMat. Now they are simply a messageboard. Their traffic isn't that much more than ours in all honesty, especially when you consider the popularity of each sport.

 

The GID actually has the same backend as we do, so with a little creativity they could easily have a very nice website that is an all inclusive website. In all honesty I probably hit up Harrell's website more often during the season than the GID because they offer a good amount of true content and not opinions.

Well, let's just hope you don't die! Good luck with the site.

 

 

Thousands? Lol ok. Share numbers are share numbers

 

Polls and rankings are not the same thing. In our conference threads for instance we poll for MVP/POY, all conference teams, etc. Then there are user driven rankings of teams, classes from fans throughout the state. Links to these polls. Im on there quite often in the fall and don't see much of this

 

The GID provides a platform. Before its founder passed, it also ran similar content in terms of articles and interviews, in addition to the Indiana Football Digest print magazine, and the Griddy awards in Indianapolis (now under RRSN ownership, but still thriving). I saw links to newspaper articles but not much original content. The Football Digest has always been a RRSN concern and the GID only nominal, if ever, involved.

 

If your argument is one is better, it's irrelevant. The question posed was do they, all IN HS sports, stand to benefit by some sort of sharing, joint venture. I think the answer is obviously yes. To what degree, I have no idea. But if you want to argue who brings what to the table, I suggest you find a mirror.

 

If the answer is obviously yes there would seem to some reasons why. I have not seen any other then ease of clicking from one to another. Who brings more to the table in terms of its fans clear. Its a blow out.

Frankly based on your inability to use the quote function properly when both sites use the same platform, I'm not surprised you fail to find the things I've mentioned. You also simply don't know what you're taking about on other aspects of involvement/ownership with your revisionist history. And I gave you the most obvious reason why, traffic = growth.

I don't see the IM crashing servers, if you think your followers are somehow superior, all 35 of them, again have that argument with a mirror.

 

 

One man's ads are another man's annoyance. You have already said that ads are not intrusive. I personally find the donation drives annoying. To each his own.

 

Logistical benefit. This is why McDonald's and Home Depot build their stores near other stores, high traffic areas, and not in isolated areas that are difficult to find. Neither are difficult to find. Poor argument to try to convince either concern to consolidate.

 

No idea, does it matter? I assure you no one is quitting their day job, these sites are labors of love. No doubt, you have giving an excellent reason why the owners/moderators would not want to give up any control.

This site has been around for x number of years and I just heard about it this year (via the GID).

Who said they have to give up control?

One man's donation drive is another man's begging.

 

What exactly is the benefit of central hub?

 

Who controls the central hub?

Logistical benefit. This is why McDonald's and Home Depot build their stores near other stores, high traffic areas, and not in isolated areas that are difficult to find.

No idea, does it matter? I assure you no one is quitting their day job, these sites are labors of love.

I link to much of the content through social media and it appears from shares that I see, thousands of others do too.

 

Polls and rankings are the same thing. What else do the GID users provide? The more I look at Indiana Mat the more content I see. I guess I see one being a comprehensive site covering all aspects and one just being a message board with a few user driving polls.

Thousands? Lol ok.

Polls and rankings are not the same thing. In our conference threads for instance we poll for MVP/POY, all conference teams, etc. Then there are user driven rankings of teams, classes from fans throughout the state.

The GID provides a platform. Before its founder passed, it also ran similar content in terms of articles and interviews, in addition to the Indiana Football Digest print magazine, and the Griddy awards in Indianapolis (now under RRSN ownership, but still thriving).

If your argument is one is better, it's irrelevant. The question posed was do they, all IN HS sports, stand to benefit by some sort of sharing, joint venture. I think the answer is obviously yes. To what degree, I have no idea. But if you want to argue who brings what to the table, I suggest you find a mirror.

Not many website of our nature survive long because of mainly funding. I am quite proud that we have found ways to not beg for money each year for the basic function of the website. I am even prouder that everything here is free and we are not a subscription based website like some are and others are becoming.

 

The wrestling community is very devoted and passionate. The GID may get more hits, but it's not where I go to see the SAC or NECC standings. I go there to see who the best running back is or other gibber jabber.

 

I have been on the GID and check it during the football season. I have even seen people mention IndianaMat quite often, even to the moderators on ways to not beg for money.

 

If it comes off as elitist, so be it. I'm fine with that as many didn't believe this website would survive one year...let alone 7.

I'll chalk this up to traffic envy.

The GID doesn't beg and you're not likely to be on Shark Tank anytime soon, so let's get a grip. The GID chose to not run ads for the benefit and at the request of membership. Their costs are much more prohibitive than IM's based on traffic. I really don't see the big deal in asking for donations or running ads, there both minimally invasive on the user experience.

To the original point, both sites, IN high school sports in general, would certainly stand to benefit if there were a central hub drawing and sharing users. That's all.

Keep up the good work.

 

 

I'd bet the vast majority go straight to the forums.

 

Maybe but I bet the individual and team rankings are popular. I bet the two new articles by respected journalists every week during the season are popular. I bet the results section is popular. These are all things I dont see on Gridiron Digest. I know I look at those things a lot more than the forum during the season.

 

These are all things they link through the forum threads/posts, which tells me how 1) how popular they really are, or 2) where the vast majority of user's bookmarks/favorites link to (thus bypassing said content).

There's more similarities than you realize, the difference is in how content is presented. The GID is user driven, plenty of polls, rankings, etc. The IM is owner/moderator driven, they create much of the unofficial "official" content.

 

 

Is IM?

 

YES. Click around on the homepage and I think you will find it is much more.

 

 

Elaborate.

 

Elaborate on what? I expressed that I don't think it is the mission of the Gridiron Digest to grow all sports in Indiana and America.

He never said that was the GID's goal. He asked a question, "isn't the goal...?". The GID's purpose has always been to grow and promote the sport of football in Indiana. I imagine IM's is pretty similar for wrestling. While not identical, there's certainly a common ground between the two.

Is the gridiron digest anything more than a message board?

Is IM?

I don't that that is the mission of the Gridiron digest.

Elaborate.

I guess I need to put it another way. The goals and purpose of each site are on different ends of the spectrum. For instance they ask for donations while we are 100% self sufficient while also giving back to the wrestling community.

Ooof, maybe put it another "another way" 'cause that comes off a little elitist.

I really see no difference in the goals or purpose between the two, you both are attempting to promote and grow your sports.

Self sufficient can be defined in variable terms. You run ads. The GID does not. The GID has a much larger, arguably more devoted community in comparison. I'm not sure this site could run on the generosity of its "core" members like the GID can/does/has for years.

I enjoy both sites, I think there's a little posturing if you don't believe some form of networking between the sites would be beneficial to both (maybe more so this site based purely on traffic). I mean most kids above manlet size generally participate(d) in both sports. There's a built in reciprocity there.

Typical Mac

Let's talk about your race car chair, shall we?

Can't get part 1 to play. Anyone else encountering this?

Nvm, just not in safari, but working on other browsers.

I think Cathedral gets all 6 through Friday night. Them & Portage are for sure the dark horses, Warren got bad draws, Penn I think isn't a huge factor (especially since Woods won't beat Parris), it's Brownsburg's to lose. But ah, we left out good ol Mater Dei w/ 3 potential state champs...

Loser makes a donation to the winner's school/organization/booster club of choice?

Name your stakes. We can have one of the site mods hold it in escrow to ensure the loser pays and the winner gets their stake back.

All the hype and predictions surrounding 220 remind me of one of the best scenes in one of the best television series...

"You want it to be one way... but it's the other way."

138: Penn's Trace Manspeaker over SB Clay's Rishod Cotton 3-1

For Penn, Woods won 3-2, Prentice won 15-0...

160: Isaish White wins by pin:

170: Rollian Sturkey, wins by tech fall:

182: Dre Garner: wins by decision:

195: Kendale McCoy: wins with a pin.

220: Allen Stallings: loses via decision.

285: Chris Middlebrooks: wins by decision.

106: Peter Ogunsanya wins with a decision.

113: Robert Campos: wins by major decision.

120: Eddie Boulivar: wins by major decision

126: Tony Madrigal: wins by decision.

132: Gabe Townsell: wins with a tech fall.

138: Jaime Hernandez: wins by decision.

145: Mikey Ordonez: wins by decision.

152: Drew Matticks: loses by tech fall.