Following football on Twitter

Not familiar with Twitter? Watch this 2:23 minute Commoncraft video for a quick introduction: Twitter in Plain English.

Twitter asks people to answer the question “what are you doing?” in 140 characters or less – and surprisingly people do just that. It's a bit like sending a text message to anyone and everyone who's paying attention. “I am eating toast.” “I am going somewhere or other.” To some, this shared minutiae is fascinating.

While being told in 140 characters or less that someone is “eating toast” can seem a bit like social media overkill, Twitter also acts as a sort of news and links portal. This makes Twitter really useful from a different perspective; it makes it an ideal tool for following football.

Anyway, some months ago I set up a Twitter account for our local soccer club and quickly discovered that it was incredibly easy to embed the resultant Tweets (yes, that is what those little micro posts are called) onto the club's home page. This seemed like an easy way to add fresh content to the page on a regular basis and a great way to instantly publish our teams' latest results. Or so I thought. Unfortunately the idea didn't really pan out as expected; without willing volunteers to keep me informed of the match results, it was often a couple of days before the results could be found online, and in the case of junior teams not even then. Not so instant afterall...

The real value in using Twitter though has been the ability to “Follow” and share (ie “Retweet”) the posts of others - and in the Twitterverse there are a lot of people tweeting (yes, that's what it's called) about the World Game.

Once I had the club's account up and running I ran a couple of searches on the terms, “soccer” and “football” which returned enough results to start following the football tweets of several other twitter users. I started by following: FOXSoccerNews, goal_intl, Soccernet, Socceroos and TheWorldGame because these were the first football Tweeters I found. Each of these in turn followed a whole bunch of other football enthused tweeters, and these were duly followed too, providing new fodder for our club's Twitter-mill (okay, I made that one up).

Want to know more about Twitter?

Check out Rafe Needleman's Newbie's guide to Twitter or Arun Basil Lal's Twitter Quick Start Guide

Over the past few months the list of people our club “follows” has grown to 318, meaning that whenever I log in there are oodles and oodles of new posts: match results for games all around the world, comments from players, links to match reports, transfer rumours, match commentary and other football related news.

The “Retweet” function makes it simple to share any of these posts with people who are following us on Twitter, and because of the Twitterfeed embedded in our home page, these new and retweeted posts are visible there, for a short time too.

So Twitter is a pretty useful tool for staying up-to-date with what's going on in the footballing world, I have found it useful for quickly and easily sharing results, links and brief messages. I love that it can be embedded into the club's home page and I am impressed by the fact that Google's RSS Reader can send interesting links to Twitter too, but that's another story...

Brainstorming

The new WSC committee had their first management meeting a month or so ago and have a fundraising brainstorming session scheduled for this weekend, followed by a general committee meeting the next Saturday. The fundraising sub-committee have had their thinking caps on and will head up to the meeting room at West Winds on Saturday to throw their ideas around and hopefully come up with some sound proposals to put before the rest of the committee.

I decided to look into what's involved in conducting a brainstorming session. The rules seem to be quite simple. At the start of the session, the issue being addressed should be defined as a simple problem, in our case it will probably be something along the lines of “How can we raise money?” Once the “problem” has been defined, a time limit should be set on the actual brainstorming process, 20 -30 minutes is suggested by Jeffrey Baumgartner in his article titled: The Step by Step Guide to Brainstorming

During this time participants should call out ideas, which are faithfully recorded on a whiteboard, a big sheet of paper or some-such – and idea-wise anything goes! The aim is to stimulate creativity, so no idea should be rejected at this stage, in fact the more 'out there' ideas can often act as a catalyst leading towards previously un-thought of and creative solutions.

Once the time limit has passed the group should agree on the top five ideas and create a series of criteria (around five) by which to judge them, for example: the idea should be financially viable, the idea should be legal and so on and so forth. Each idea is then assessed against these criteria and the idea that best addresses these is adopted as the solution.

Sounds like fun!

ALT-TAB-check-tweet-sorry

I should begin this post with an apology and perhaps an explanation.

So, firstly sorry for going AWOL and neglecting to add to this blog over the past couple of weeks. My wordy absence may have inadvertently made it seem like the whole football thing had stopped happening, but the truth of the matter is that there is so much happening that it's very distracting and it gets in the way of actually putting fingertips to keyboard to tell you about it.

Add to that, that sometimes the very idea of sending words out into the Blogosphere is a bit intimidating: Blogger's Block; worse than Writer's Block by a whole roll of toilet paper!

I will have to tell you about Twitter sometime too, as it is one of the prime offenders when it comes to addictive distractions – but not here, not now. Suffice it to say that in the few minutes it took me to type these words there have been 37 new tweets on the club's twitter page from various football tweeters that we are “following”. Reading them (and occasionally retweeting for our own followers) cost me a few minutes too, in which time there were 11 more new tweets.

On the bright side I do know that Manchester United just put in a goal against Bursaspor in their Group C EUFA Champions League Clash. I know that the Liverpool reserves beat Sunderland 2 – 1, and that Tottenham Hotspurs. just seconds ago, increased their lead to 2 – 0 against Inter Milan, in their Champions League game. Another quick check tells me that Man U have just blasted in 2 more goals and that Inter Milan have clawed a goal back against the Spurs... but wait, with only minutes to spare Tottenham makes it 3 – 1!

See what I mean? It's addictive!

While I am typing this post, I can see, at the bottom of my computer screen that there are new tweets waiting, but I'll be strong; I'll fight the urge to ALT-TAB-check them and instead get back to what I was originally saying. Which was..... can anyone remember?

Something for the juniors...

Uni SC are at it again; in addition to conducting the Twilight Cup competition for interested youth and senior players, they have added a spring/summer program for junior players aged 8 to 11 (under 9 to under 12 players). The sessions are scheduled to take place at Olinda Grove, Mount Nelson on Thursday afternoons from 5:00 to 6:30 pm and will run from 28th October through to 9th December.

While the focus will be on skill development, the sessions will also include small-sided games, where participants will divided into teams based on age, ability and gender in order to play mini games that consist of two twenty minutes halves.

From a developmental perspective, the opportunity for our junior players to participate in post season training sessions is valuable one. Not only is their season effectively extended, allowing them more time to hone their skills, it also provides the opportunity for them to learn from highly qualified coaches whilst playing the game they enjoy.

The cost for the program is set at $55 per player, which works out at just under $8.00 per session, or around $5.00 per hour. It sounds like good value for junior players who are already missing their soccer. It is also a great opportunity for them to meet players from other clubs, and since each training session finishes just before the Mixed Social Twilight games start, there is also the option to stick around and watch the game being played by senior mixed teams.

Even better, Olinda Grove is only around 25 minutes from Woodbridge, there are three well-maintained ovals plus change rooms and clubrooms – it’s a great venue for football and it’s not too far away.


As there are limited places available due to space restrictions and coach availability, those interested in taking part in the program are urged to enrol online
Anyone wanting more information should contact John Parry on: 0412 07 05 39 or email him at: J.S.Parry@tassie.net.au

Toe the Line

Thankfully, the Dr reckons that Mr Y's toe is not broken; it's still bruised, and possibly has a little tendon damage but nothing too serious.

So we have spent a small fortune on sport bandaging and will tape the offending digit to offer it some protection, because of course, Mr Y has no intention of letting something like an unbroken toe stop him from playing.

After all: “It doesn't hurt when I'm playing, it only hurts when I stop!”

Futsal grading games

Futsal grading games took place on the weekend, and I began to wonder if nominating a team was such a good idea. All of our lads, bar one of them, are recovering from various injuries (two badly sprained ankles, a possible broken toe, a hamstring injury and a twisted knee). According to his dad, our sixth player hasn't kicked a ball since this time last year – not that you could tell when he blasted a beautiful long ball from half way down the pitch into the back of the opponent's net early in the game. It wasn't enough mind you, the injuries certainly seemed to take their toll in the second half; and the lads ultimately went down 7 – 2. Not a shining start to the competition, but given the quality of the opposition and the match fitness of our players, perhaps not a surprising one.

Knowing their various ills, I had nominated the team for the social division, thinking this would be the best level for them to compete at, at least until they are all recovered. The opponents for the grading game, however seemed a far cry from a social team. Ultimately this supports my theory that our boys are not yet recovered enough to compete at a higher level, however much they may want to.

Time now to take the injured toe, and the boy attached to it, to the doctor's...

What's she rabbiting on about?

I have just vicariously lived through the excitement of the National Schools Futsal Titles, where several local youth players, including Mr Y, competed. Even though that competition is over and the prodigal son returned, only slightly damaged, to the nest, the football excitement doesn't look like stopping any time soon. Around this joint Mr O (O for oldest) is looking forward to the Twilight Cup; and all three lads are gearing up to play their first futsal game of the summer roster.

So even though our local club has handed the clubrooms back to the Cricket Club, football is not really over. There's plenty of action awaiting those who don't want to stop playing. The aforementioned Twilight Cup and futsal games will take us all the way through to December – a break for Christmas, and then before you know it there's all the exhilaration of the Summer Cup which ends smack-bang before the 2011 football season starts.

Even those football fans who are having a well-earned break from playing have plenty to keep them occupied. There's the A-League, the W-League, the National Youth League, the Socceroos, the Matildas and the Fusalroos and that's just in Australia! In Europe the major competitions are under-way: English Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and the Champions League just to name a few of the more prominent ones.

For organisers of the sport there's analysis, planning and preparation; off-season is the ideal time for the new committee to look back to see what worked and what went wrong during the 2010 season. They'll be making decisions and trying to make sure that they are well prepared for the season ahead.

Anyway, back to the point, my personal mission with this blog is to provide football related, and possibly even interesting, content during the off-season – aimed at, but not exclusive to, WSC members. I also plan to share some of my experiences with the various web tools that I have been trialling throughout the 2010 season. Beyond the World Game itself, I'm hoping to include some sources of useful information for those volunteers who may find themselves in unfamiliar territory and in need of a road map.

If it all sounds like a rather confusing excuse to inflict my self-indulgent ramblings on an unsuspecting cyberspace, well there is that too..........