Two Weeks In, Blogs Are a Hit

Thursday, August 7

Two weeks ago we launched a new era in TroyTrojans.com history with a wide variety of blogs. You have seen blog entries from staff members, a trainer, a manager and three student-athletes.

The response from readers has been overwhelmingly supportive, and that is great. Our focus is to provide Troy fans with as much information as we can. Some entries have obviously been more informative than others, some have even mixed in a little humor, but all serve to get Troy fans more involved and more invested in the Troy Athletics program.

On the football side, I am still looking to add more student-athlete bloggers. We currently have three offensive players contributing on a regular basis, and one of the kickers has indicated that he is willing to write for us, but we have yet to land a player from the defense. He's out there, and we'll find him.

With volleyball and soccer starting camp, both will have bloggers submitting information in the coming days, so watch for that.

But, the blogs aren't all we have planned for the web site.

In the coming weeks we hope to introduce some live chat sessions with coaches and student-athletes. These will be opportunities for you, Troy fans, to submit questions for consideration to be answered. I'll keep you posted on when to look for those.

We'll also be starting our web streaming in the coming days. In fact, tomorrow we'll be web streaming Troy University's Faculty & Staff Convocation from Claudia Crosby Theater so that Troy University employees on other campuses will be able to watch the event live.

This will be the first time we have attempted to steam an event such as this, but we will make every effort to make the stream go smoothly.

On Saturday the Troy football team will hold its first scrimmage of fall camp. We had considered setting up a web stream of that event but, in all honesty, we'd rather not provide the Trojans' early opponents extra information prior to the season, so we will not stream that event.

We will, however, attempt to stream media day activities on Saturday afternoon. You'll be able to watch and hear each member of the Troy coaching staff talk about their players and get a wrap-up from Coach Larry Blakeney.

Once the season arrives, we'll make every effort to web stream as many home events as possible. All home football, volleyball, man's and women's basketball, baseball and softball games should be available. We do not have internet access at the Troy Track & Soccer Complex pressbox, but we may try to run a line from the coaches offices out to the field and stream with a low angle camera view.

The only time we will have an issue is when more than one event is scheduled at the same time. We are only able to stream one event at a time, so we may have to choose one over another when there are conflicts.

In addition, we also plan to web stream Coach Blakeney's weekly media lunch, which will be held at Country's Bar-B-Q this year.

As I have told our folks here, the opportunities are virtually limitless for what we can do with TroyTrojans.com We want to explore as many possibilities as we can so, if you have an idea for something you'd like to see, read or hear, please let me know.

You can reach me via e-mail at jehazel@troy.edu. The more positive feedback we get, the more we can show that this effort is working. So, let us hear what you think.

Coming Attractions: There are some other things coming from our web provider, JumpTV, in the weeks ahead. They recently launched web views customized for your phone for all of their web sites. You can reach ours at m.troytrojans.com.

In the coming weeks JumpTV is also working to develop new applications for live game statistics, for photo viewers and for live video and audio. These should all be great improvements for our web site.

JumpTV is also working to develop programming that will help us with our blogging. Apparently, they have received an explosion of requests from their web partners fr help with adding blogs to web sites.

From our end, Assistant Director of Media Relations Travis Jarome has done a great job of getting all of our various blog entries up as well as designing the pages and headers for them. He is constantly tweaking them to get the best look possible as well as the most ease of use.

Get Well Wishes: I wanted to pass along a couple of get-well wishes today. Coach Larry Blakeney will be absent from practice on Friday to be with his mother, who is having a surgical procedure. We want to wish Mrs. Lucille Blakeney all the best.

Also, Troy University photographer Kevin Glackmeyer suffered a knee injury on Monday while shooting volleyball pictures. He has been laid up since then with a regimen of icing and rest. Hopefully, Kevin can get back to work very soon.

The Saga Ends: Finally, you knew the Brett Favre saga of the last week was eventually going to result in some poor quarterback losing his job. Unfortunately, the QB who lost his job is a friend of mine.

In 1999, I left Southern Miss, the home of Brett Favre, to work at Marshall. I was quickly introduced to the senior quarterback of the Thundering Herd, Chad Pennington, who was gearing up for his final season and a run at the Heisman Trophy.

Pennington had a great year, taking the Herd to a 13-0 record and a No. 10 final ranking. He finished fifth in the final Heisman voting and was a first round draft pick of the New York Jets. He has spent the last eight, often injury-riddled seasons, leading the Jets.

That ended this morning when he was released to clear cap space for Favre.

I arrived at Southern Miss well AB (after Brett), but got a chance to meet him while I was there. Favre and Pennington are a lot alike in that they are both very personable and both would have made great generals in the Army because they are such good leaders.

The biggest difference between them was their right arm. Favre could, and probably still can, split a receivers' hand open with a pass while Pennington has had to rely on cunning as a result of two shoulder surgeries.

It's too bad that a guy like Pennington had to lose his job, but I am sure he will sign somewhere else fairly quickly. He'd make for a nice fit in Minnesota or Chicago, where he can go try to do what the Packers were so afraid Favre would do if they had released him.

Troy University Athletics

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