jimdahl

Wandering away from athletics for a moment, here's a random fact. There were 1409 men ages 20-21 enrolled in UND in 1997-98. Student profile

Sticking with the Lacrosse theme-- 14-1-0 is the overall record achieved by conference-mate, University of St. Thomas, who won the UMLL in 2008 (UND finished #7/9). UND Lacrosse

I'm not sure how I would make it happen, but I'd like to get Marty Schriner on the main list. In his time, as important to the team's success as players who had the fortune of playing on more successful teams. Disclaimer: As a general philosophy, I'm probably somewhat biased toward the good players from less successful teams -- it's easier to look good when your linemates are Bob Joyce and Steve Johnson.

14 days, 11 hours until UND's first D-I volleyball game, according to fightingsioux.com

This one's for Sicatoka... 14 - The number of assists team-leading Jakob Kaup had in 12 GP for the UND lacrosse team in 2008. UND Lacrosse

The Sioux are facing a lot of new opponents this season (though the Javelinas aren't such), so I thought it would be fun to have a pregame scouting thread for each where we could collect links and articles. Javs see promise in new players - Caller-Times Javelinas' Linebacker Craves A Winning Year - KRISTV.com Trying Times - Players look to make a mark during scrimmage Caller-Times I expect this line to generate indignant hate mail to the Caller-Times from Bison fans: Not because it says UND is I-A, but because it says I-A instead of BCS

Oops... I missed 1417, I had a good one -- score of UND's first and only football championship, from GVSU's perspective, 14-17. Oh well. Let's give a little love to a less-discussed sport: 2007 Women's soccer Cumulative season Goals in 2nd half: 14 Goals in 1st half: 13 Women's soccer 2007 stats

Back on topic, from Selling Division I in the G.F. Herald, Faison answered your questions:

#14 Travis Bledsoe and #21 Emmanuel Little were the leading G and F scorers for men's basketball's final season in D-II.

As I've been working on transitioning the site in anticipation of FCS/GWFC football, one of the things I came across was an old NCC football links page. Out with the old, in with the new: FCS/GWFC Football Links Feel free to add your own if you know of any I don't.

He has cited "Internet message boards" once or twice when directly quoting threads, but for the most part leaves such unattributed. The "citations" usually just leave me chuckling at their unwillingness to actually properly cite the site by name -- can you imagine someone here quoting a Forum column and attributing it to "a column in a printed newspaper". PS -- Nice pickup on the game, UND. You can tell UND did something good when the thread about it attracts >50% posts from Bison fans; they were getting bored with us for a while there.

I hate it when people drag a discussion from one message board to another. Replies no longer have the benefit of context, and the original author no longer has the opportunity to respond to replies/criticisms. If you want to reply to someone's post, hit reply, don't copy the text and go criticize it in friendlier confines. Because it's a pet peeve of mine, we're probably less tolerant of that than a reasonable person would be. As to sports forums containing discussion of rivals -- of course they do! I would find one that didn't highly peculiar. I remember with fondness the day that 10 of the 20 visible thread titles on POI contained the word "Parise". Talk about Gopher hockey is unapologetically on topic for this forum.

No question, our web page menus definitely aren't particularly iPhone friendly. Flatter navigation should return soon... However, I do see your point about the extra clicks. Having to launch Safari and find the right bookmark is a few more clicks than just having a "Sioux Sports" icon that you click (even if the underlying application is really just a combination of RSS feeds and web pages). My initial reaction was that the hockey page was designed specifically to meet the precise information aggregation need you're noting -- feeds of news, blog posts, forum posts, and scores of interest to Sioux hockey fans all in one page. Though the web page is a device-neutral, universal solution, an iPhone-specific application is a slightly different way to bundle it that could be better optimized to the screen (e.g. less zooming and panning). I'll give it some thought, but lest I stifle creativity, I certainly encourage others to respond to the challenge and innovate in ways of delivering Sioux information! I love to see new ideas; make a cool way to deliver information about the Sioux, and I'm happy to promise you a link and a fair amount of resultant traffic.

My goal for SiouxSports.com has always been to create a collecting place and aggregator of everything about the Sioux. To that end, everything you listed BUT the play-by-play (for which there's no good Internet data source) should already be available. Though it's targeted at less capable devices, there has even been a mobile Internet version of the site since 2000. I've avoided optimizing for the Blackberry browser (which seems kind of stopgap), but I've definitely worked on making sure the site works on iPhones via Safari, and consume it that way myself. There are always changes brewing (the next revision should replace the menu bars with something more iPhone-friendly), but if there's something in particular that you think would improve the mobile experience, just drop me a note and I'll be sure to add it to the list!

No problem. Either grab: http://forum.siouxsports.com/index.php?act=rssout&id=3 or click the RSS icon in the lower left and grab the URL off that. That one is by most recent post, but feel free to make a suggestion if you have a different preference. I'm happy to create these, but do configure each one individually upon request (in that RSS feeds haven't been a particularly popular way to consume the forum).

UND's 2008 (final year of D-II) baseball record: 14/37

I was thinking roughly the same thing -- thanks for the useful data, but a missed opportunity to provide meaningful visualization.

Wasn't 1446 yesterday, and 1447 the day before, making today 1445? Final D-II Women's Basketball for UND (3/14/08 vs Wayne State). Wayne St shoots 14/31 from the field (45%) to take a 38-26 lead from which UND never recovered, making this UND's final D-II game.

It's been discussed in the past and the overwhelming response was that people actively don't want a politics forum here. A place for political discussion? Since "no politics" is my prior, it would take tremendous interest from members to convince me that such a forum could help the community rather than harm it. As Goon pointed out, there's no shortage of places on the Internet that you can talk politics, you don't need SiouxSports.com to have a politics forum to have such an outlet. If you only want to talk politics with hockey fans, try USCHO. Daily Kos and Huffington Post make the news a lot as left-leaning political discussion blogs (though I can't personally vouch for either). I'm not thinking of any similarly large right-leaning forums off the top of my head, though others can surely help.

As part of a makeover (additional details of which I'll explain in a later post), I was able to add "discussion" pages directly into the wikis, similar to Wikipedia. This is really the ideal format for Wiki discussions, so they stay attached to the pages being discussed. Familiarity, given that it's the way Wikipedia works, is also a nice benefit. Given that I was able to finally achieve this goal, I'm also now able to close the now-superfluous (and not particularly lively) wiki forum.

From On Frozen Blog: Should Big Joe Go Pro?

From the NCAA blog: Message Board Hoax Goes Too Far

I kinda hope Washington signs him before the third period.

Ok, this isn't a perfect fit, but I'll try to squeeze this one in... 1452 On 3-11-67, Phil Jackson scored 52 points at Normal, Ill. (#2 all time).

When NDSU transitioned, it managed to build excitement around unknown I-AA teams coming to town while being just 70 miles away from a recent D-II national champion playing in the toughest conference in D-II and being competitive in the playoffs annually. It did so by convincing Fargoans that it was an exciting time to be an NDSU fan. There's no doubt UND can't play the "I-AA/FCS in N.D. for the first time" card that NDSU did, but I don't think that's what we're talking about. I'm talking about building excitement among the faithful about this big transition in UND athletics history. Let people who are already predisposed to be Sioux fans know that there's a new coach, new division, new opponents, and that it's an exciting and important time to support the team and be a Sioux fan. Now, I do think in the long run it's a smart strategy to try to attract more neutral North Dakotans who already have some interest in UND because they follow its D-I hockey success, but we all already know that marketing only goes so far and that a winning product would be a big key to that equation. Just because we can't control the latter yet is no reason to abdicate on the former.