[Video] Sharon High Highlights - and media coverage!

^ the A team



^ the B team

From Coach Dave Christiansen - "The A-team finished third in the state tourney for Division 2 and our B-team won the D3 state championship tourney"

The team also garnered some awesome local press. Click here for the article.




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[Ultimate in the Papes] College decisions and state champs

Ultimate coverage from papers around the country....

• Continuing in our vein of posts from a few days ago Carl Butt out of Springfield, Il garnered some local media attention for heading to the University of Chicago after starting his high school's ultimate program.
• Elsewhere the John Jay Air Raid garnered a nice long article with a photo for their performance in the NY state champs. Even more impressive is the fact that there was NOT ONE PUN! in the entire article. It was a seriously written news piece on a local teams performance. I might suggest attaching it to press releases you send to your local paper (especially in NY) to show other local media outlets covering the sport.
• Medfield in Massachusetts grabbed some coverage for their state champs efforts as well.
  

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[Throwback Post] How to get local media attention for your high school team

wrote this a while ago (also 2006) - but I think it is as important now as ever. Ultimate's continued growth and publicity will continue to depend on grassroots efforts like high school teams pressuring local papers to cover them until/if/and when the UPA develops a comprehensive PR and marketing strategy for the future of the sport. And even then it is doubtful that their strategy could be so comprehensive as to extend to local leagues (though if I were developing it, it would do exactly that).

But I digress, if you are interested in getting your team some coverage here are a few tips for you...

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Hampton High school featured in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

very cool for Hampton and the Pittsburgh High School Ultimate League.

Read more at www.post-gazette.com/pg...

im not sure exactly how they went about garnering this coverage, but may i present this advice to anyone out there who is looking for some recognition for all the hard work they do for their respective team - press releases.

news organizations rely on press releases in a very big way to report the news. how is a newspaper supposed to know you are having a game, tournament or otherwise without you telling them? the news industry doesn't work through magic, nor esp, nor mindreading. and many many many times papers and magazines are looking for something new, fresh, interesting and exciting to print - and if you think like me, ultimate is all of those.

never written a press release before? fear not, they are extremely easy.

heres a little tutorial to get you started - http://www.stetson.edu/~rhansen/prguide.html

basically what you want to remember though is to make it sound as much like an actual news story as possible. you want to make the story appealing and easy to read, and make sure to include easily accesibly contact information.

writing a poor press release - with spelling or simple grammer mistakes can often have the opposite effect, turning an editor or reporter off to the idea of covering your event because it is so frustrating to read.

also, concrete things are always better. if you can hand your release over personally to someone in the office (or fax it) it is always better than sending an email which can easily be removed with the click of a button.

the more professional things look the better your chances.one final note - if you are interested in this type of stuff, start out small, no doubt you have a high school newspaper, talk to the guys on their staff, give them a press release, and then move up from there.

good luck, and if (when) you have any success feel free to email the site - playultimateblog@gmail.com to let us know and we can feature the news on the site.

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We're getting there, slowly but surely

For those of you who might not already know PlayUltimate.us collects ultimate related content from around the web and publishes it in a Digg-like platform (you see a ultimate article in your local paper? post it there. blog about a tournament? post it there.)

But, for much of its existence there have been major lulls in posting activities. Usually centered around those months where ultimate itself lies dormant, but recently this hasn't been the case. There has been a fairly steady and continuous stream of ultimate related content.

Especially content created by the ultimate community has found some benchmarks of production regularity -

• The Huddle has proven to be a consistently published magazine with relevant topics
• Match Diesel and Spin Ultimate have been contributing commentary to the college scene
• UltiTraining has thrown out tips to the more competitive and fitness-minded ultimate player
• YouthUltimate has picked up the slack where we may have fallen behind on the youth scene.
• The Cultimate Opinion regularly checks in (multiple times a week) on club and random ultimate topics.
• UltiVillage posts clips of the day
• and the UPA finally found a way to bring the College Championships to the masses with narrated video highlights at the end of each day and streaming finals.
  

And these are just a few of the many sites. My point being there was a time not so long ago (read: the foundation of this site) where ultimate content was hard to come by. RSD was your best shot and what you found there was name calling, trolls, spam and hate spew. While RSD is still all of those things there are now viable and productive alternatives, and they are in my mind proving a more verdent incubator of the sport. There is more published ultimate knowledge available to young players than ever before.

Sure - the sport doesn't have the comprehensive coverage of the NFL. Certainly though, slowly but surely, we're getting there.

[edit] - an update by PJ at cultimate looks at the different types of articles in the ultimate blogosphere.

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