ScoreBook.com
Free Web-based Amateur Sports League Management Tools
Powered by IBM iSeries and LANSA
RAMSEY, New Jersey - December 7, 2000 - ScoreBook.com, a worldwide sports destination, has opened its virtual doors for business. With ScoreBook.com, amateur sports league managers will have the tools they need to run their leagues from a single Web site for free.
ScoreBook.com gives amateur sports leagues a central place to manage their operations. Leagues get a free web site that can be customized without the need for web design or programming. Within this web site, games between teams can be scheduled, their results and highlights (with action photos) recorded, and league standings can be maintained. A lifetime history of the league is always available through the retention of multiple seasons of data on-line. There is central coordination for "Free agents" who are looking to find a team. Through web and email messages, there is easy communications between the league's management, team managers, players, and fans.

Teams in leagues managed by ScoreBook.com also receive a free web site that can be easily customized without the need for web design or programming. Uploaded pictures and logos with team messages andplayer rosters form the core of the team web page. For each game, the team can tell its own story of the game, with highlights and action photos.
There's even more to come! Even now, the ScoreBook.com development team is working to extend the site to include extra features. They include additional sports, player statistics, league statistical leaders, and player home pages with custom baseball cards and lifetime statistics.
Why ScoreBook.com was created
"For years I've been managing three baseball leagues by myself, manually, using Excel spreadsheets," explains Mitch Miles, ScoreBook.com director. "I do all the scheduling, input all the game results, and set up all the players." He showed us a stack of paper spreadsheets; rows and rows of statistics in miniscule print. "See this? It's a full time job all by itself, and I know I'm not the only one going blind sitting for hours inputting this stuff for multiple leagues."
That's an understatement. Participation in amateur sports is at an all-time high. In the United States alone, over seventeen million people participate in amateur baseball (source: American Sports Data, 1996 survey); and over thirty million people play basketball. Worldwide, over 120 million people play professional or amateur soccer.
"It seemed to me that the Internet would be a good way for team managers to share the workload," says Miles.
"I'm not a Web designer," he continued. "My leagues' sites were functional, but that's about it. I envisioned ScoreBook.com as providing not just the best league management tools available on the Web, but also a way of creating a slick-looking Web site without having to know anything about making Web pages.
"I approached Strategic Business Systems of Ramsey, New Jersey because they had a proven record of success with Internet systems to turn this vision into reality. We've put together an easy-to-use tool that will give league managers everything they need."
How ScoreBook.com was created
"ScoreBook.com is a variation on the Business-to-Consumer Internet business model," says ScoreBook.com Corporate Director John Myers. "Instead of selling products over the Internet, we're providing a service that people really need. ScoreBook.com's long-term goal is to provide the only truly multilingual, state-of-the-art league and team management tools on the Web. We intend to become a true global online community for the many millions of sports participants worldwide. League managers can accomplish all their management functions from the ScoreBook.com site; including communicating with team managers and players, setting up game schedules, recording and publishing game results (with box scores, game highlights, and action photos), keeping player statistics, and determining team standings and league leaders."
A Web project with this kind of worldwide scope demands a development environment that can generate dynamic pages quickly and seamlessly and handle multilingual development without re-coding. To develop ScoreBook.com, Strategic chose LANSA for the Web, a fourth generation language application development tool.
"LANSA lets us define the data in the LANSA repository once, then develop standard templates to generate many of our systems functions without writing a line of code," explains John Myers. "The LANSA repository allows us to define all data elements as multilingual, so that we will be able to easily extend ScoreBook.com to the world. We will generate our application once and rely on LANSA to serve the Web pages in the needed languages. Our developers worked with our graphic designers to come up with a fast-loading, attractive user interface that was used to create the LANSA templates. To hand-code the HTML, Java script, and CGI programs required for this sort of functionality could take years. With LANSA for the Web, the pieces fit together easily."
ScoreBook.com runs on an IBM iSeries Model 270 eServer. "The iSeries is the heart of our organization," John Myers says. "As a Web server, it offers unparalleled reliability, which is critical in ensuring effective 24 x 7 operation of a worldwide site. The scalability of the iSeries will make it easy to grow ScoreBook's infrastructure as the ScoreBook community grows, with no system down time. Because the iSeries doesn't require ongoing operations support, overhead costs associated with running the site are virtually nonexistent. In combination with the powerful LANSA development environment, the iSeries gives us a platform on which to deploy ScoreBook.com not just as a Web startup, but as a growing concern that can adapt to ever-changing conditions in the burgeoning sports information marketplace."

ScoreBook.com Features
ScoreBook.com provides league management tools for:
Leagues
  • Defining your sports league, including uploading league logos and photos
  • Creating a league homepage on the web (see http://www.ScoreBook.com/rvrhlatoms )
  • Linking to existing league web pages
  • Managing multiple seasons of activity for your league (including playoffs)
  • Copying seasons allows you to effortlessly bring forward data for your next season
  • Posting league rules, league history, league office directory, league awards, legal information relevant to the league, and/or league news
  • Creating and changing schedules quickly and easily, communicating rescheduling to managers and players without time-consuming phone banks
  • Creating messages on league home pages to communicate to teams and players
  • Communicating directly to team managers with custom team manager messages
  • Posting driving directions to all fields used by the league
  • Reporting team standings
Teams
  • Defining each team in the league, including uploading team logos and photos
  • Creating team homepages on the web (see http://www.ScoreBook.com/PJRaiders)
  • Linking to existing team web pages
  • Assigning players to team rosters
  • Moving players among teams / support for "free agents"
Games
  • Posting game results and highlights, with game action photos
  • Game results automatically update league standings
  • Leagues and teams can be sports journalists, putting their own spin on game reporting
Future features will include:
  • Creating player homepages on the web with photo upload, lifetime statistics, and a printable, custom baseball card
  • Linking to existing player personal web pages
  • Posting league, team, and individual player statistics
  • League leaders in individual statistical categories
  • Multi-lingual support
Strategic Business Systems, an IBM Business Partner in Ramsey, New Jersey, has been providing information systems solutions since 1982. In addition to developing and hosting the ScoreBook.com web site, Strategic is a prominent systems supplier to the motor vehicle industry, as well as a leading provider of Internet solutions across industries. Strategic customers include Harley-Davidson, Hummer, BMW, Saab, Ducati, Land Rover, KTM Sportmotorcycles, Mikasa, Goya Foods, MCS Canon, New Jersey Carpenters Pension Fund, Donna Karan, and many more prestigious names. For more information visit the company on the World Wide Web at www.sbsusa.com or call +1 (800) 727-7260.
LANSA is a leading provider of development tools and services for IBM iSeries eServer (AS/400), e-business and advanced graphical applications. Founded in 1987, LANSA is a wholly owned subsidiary of ASPECT Computing of Sydney, Australia with over 6,600 installations in 65 countries around the world. LANSA is a licensed iSeries eServer Application Development Partner, an IBM Partners-In-Development All-Star and a member of IBM's Tools Network program. For more information, visit the company on the World Wide Web at www.lansa.com or call +1 (630) 472-1234.