By Ryan Keith 21

The SIUC Athletic Department is taking a head-first dive into the Internet, and department officials see cyberspace as the perfect public relations opportunity.

The department put up a Saluki Athletics web page at http://www.siu.edu/~athletic last year in an effort to make Saluki athletics more student and alumni friendly.

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Marketing director Mike Trude said the page is one of the best ways to relate information to students and alumni.

We think it’s a great way for alumni throughout the country to keep up with the Salukis, Trude said. It’s a way for them to interact with the coaches, which they don’t get a chance to do, if at all, ever.

It’s a way for the students to ask the coach, Why should we pay a student fee to help your program out?’

The idea for the web page came from Scott Bridges and Tony Kerber, information technology specialists who work in Morris Library. Trude said Bridges, a former SIUC baseball player, decided that SIUC needed an athletics page after seeing several other schools’ home pages.

But things started slowly last year for the page. The page was updated infrequently last spring, which turned off many visitors, even though the web page included archives and live radio broadcasts of Saluki basketball games.

If you hit our pages last spring, and you hit them again two weeks later, nothing changed, Trude said. You don’t ever come back because you always want to see something new. We’re now updating it weekly, and I think people who hit on it in the spring and got frustrated will be surprised with the stuff we have.

Updates and several new additions this fall have made the page a popular site, with more than 750 visitors since Sept. 24. The page includes information on several men’s and women’s athletic teams, ticket information and a page devoted to updates on Saluki Futures, the Athletic Department’s fund-raising campaign for facilities improvements.

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Also included is the return of live broadcasts for football games, which are recorded from 95.1 WXLT-FM and played live and archived through the use of RealAudio.

Trude said that while the live broadcasts have been a popular attraction this fall, many alumni do not realize that they can now listen to football and basketball games on the Internet. Spreading word of the web page through the SIUC Alumni Association and on the Internet provided limited information about the page.

We’ve had more ex-football players listen to the games than anybody, but it took them awhile to know we were out there, Trude said. We did the games all of last year, but it was hard to get information out.

Frequent updates are the job of SIUC’s Sports Information Department. Bryan McGowan, assistant women’s sports information director, said the Internet is a time-consuming but valuable tool for the University.

Over time, it’s gotten a lot easier, McGowan said. I thought it was going to be a very difficult task. A lot of it was learned from Tony (Kerber) and looking at other schools’ pages. It is still a lot of work, and there is so much more to do.

We’re nowhere close to being where we want to be with the pages, but we’re so far ahead of where we were last year and even six months ago.

McGowan usually spends about 12 hours each week updating the page, and those times include breaks between the other duties he performs.

The future is bright for the page because Trude and the department are planning several additions to improve the site. Providing Jan Quarless’ weekly highlight show, live chats with coaches at certain times each week or month and e-mail contests are some of the events the department is planning to have on-line soon.

You never know where the information is coming from that they (the public) hear, Trude said. We can control this, and we know what’s getting out there to people via the Internet.

The more things you have to do on a page, the chances are the more you’re going to come back. Maybe you’ll read what’s on a page and see there is a game on Saturday, and maybe you’ll go.

The Saluki Athletic Department web page can be found at http://www.siu.edu/~athletic

The web page has had 756 hits since Sept. 24

All football and basketball games can be heard either live or archived at http://www.siu.edu/godawgs

E-mail comments or questions can be sent to [email protected]