Rivals and Colts focus on high school

In news highly relevant to Indiana sports fans, paidContent.org reported yesterday that Yahoo! sports has waded through all of the local contract obligations to buy Rivals.com for $100 million. The site is better known to Hoosier fans as peegs.com, which is the Indiana corner of the Rivals site.

Rivals is a great (albeit, a subscription) service to follow local college recruiting and high school prospect scouting. Much of the information reported in ESPN, Fox Sports and Sports Illustrated relies on the work done at Rivals, including a ranking of incoming classes. This is a pretty significant deal for Yahoo! in their efforts to be the main sports site. Now profitable for the past year or so, Rivals will send their new owners their 185,000 subscriber base of members paying $100-120 a year. Senior leadership (CEO Shannon Terry and others) will stay put, so nothing drastic should change regarding the quality of their product.

Thanks to Pat Coyle for writing about it today when he dropped this other little gem:

MyIndianafootball will launch with season preview content from each team, then each team in the state will get login rights so they can update content. We do dozens of youth football camps in the state already. We are also working with local media companies to cover games on radio and streaming Web video. We’re tied in with All State awards, All Star games, etc. High School football is a HUGE focus of our marketing efforts.

That high school sports focus will piggyback on the MyColts.net site by leveraging the same functions, albeit in a more restricted administration of content. Colts fans will be able to “friend” schools, deepening the ties to the NFL organization. Coyle announced a July 15 release for that new social network.

I’m excited about being able to follow local sports through MyIndianafootball, given the closed access to the local sports section in the Herald-Times. There is an H-T blog, Sports Shorts, dedicated to prep sports, but I’m guessing a collective of many contributing writers might provide more interesting coverage.