In the third grade, Ethan Erickson was already a huge fan of Saluki basketball. At one sold-out game he and his father attended, Ethan climbed under the bleachers and collected 70 plastic cups with the SIU logo, dropped by fans, and took them home.

A junior at Carbondale Community High School, Erickson maintains the The Unofficial Saluki Basketball Homepage, on the World Wide Web, where SIUC fans visit their favorite team any time.

Erickson said he doesn’t know how many people access his page he had a counter that kept track of visitors at one time, but got rid of it.

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It slowed down how the whole page loaded, so I didn’t like it much, he said. Before the season started, (when he had the counter) I was getting about 30 people a day, but it’s probably more now.

E-mail response to Erickson’s page has been encouraging, and he saves some of the messages, he said.

Sam Phillips, an SIUC alumnus living in Indiana, wrote to tell Erickson how glad he was to find his former college team on the Web.

It is very difficult to find Saluki sports in the Indiana papers, his message said. Your section is a wonderful reminder of a fabulous period of my life.

A message from Robert Reed, a 1995 graduate of SIUC, said the page was awesome.

Please keep it up for all of us alumni that still try to follow the team, he said. I will recommend it to everyone.

Erickson said although getting information to keep his site up-to-date is difficult, the creativity he is allowed as the sole maintainer makes it worth it.

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It’s pretty nice to have your own page, he said. If this were an official SIU page, I couldn’t say the referees sucked.

Erickson said he has remained a Saluki fan despite moving with his mother all over Southern Illinois and Missouri during his childhood.

My dad has always been here, he said. Whenever I’d come to see him on the weekends we would go see Saluki basketball.

Erickson said the idea came to him in June, 1995, as he spent his vacation checking out other sports sites on the Web.

When I saw that there were lots of other pages out there, I thought it would be cool to have a site for the Salukis he said.

He said that when he began the page he did not know HTML, the computer language used on the Web, so he had to learn through tutorials he found on the Internet.

The page started out with stats and profiles of the players, he said. It was pretty bland before I got Dan Phillips of the Saluki Pep Band to scan in some photos.

Getting the updated, accurate information necessary to maintain an information service is the hardest part of his job, Erickson said.

Nobody wants to cooperate, he said. The Athletic department said they were starting their own Web site, but that was in July and all they have now are schedules and a picture of the athletic director.

Now Erickson gets much of his information from other sites on the web, where scores and commentary are updated nearly as they happen, he said.

The Unnoficial Saluki Basketball Homepage is located on the World Wide Web at http://www.midwest.net/scribers/ed/main.html