It's time for the 2017 football season! So let's kick off the action by looking at which Moore League team has the best football website.
It's no secret that there's a huge disparity in the quality of football in the Moore League. Long Beach Poly always dominates, while some of the other teams are happy just to get a win or two.
Fittingly, perhaps, Poly has the best football website in the league, but in this competition it shows some weaknesses. More surprising is that Lakewood, which has a strong football program that is often second in the league only to Poly, has a website that is an embarrassment to the team and the school.
To be clear, this is a rating of each team's "official" websites, whether created by the school or the booster club. Other sites, made by fans or professional networks, are not included.
Note: Websites change. The items I cite in this article were there at the time of this article, but they may have changed by the time you get there.
Long Beach Poly
Grade: B+
Poly's football website has a multitude of features and an attractive design. It has schedules for varsity, junior varsity and freshman teams. There is a full varsity roster. There's a list of the coaches, with brief biographical details on each. One page recounts the history of the program.
This is all good, but a closer look shows some flaws.
The 2017 schedule on the home page is labeled "2014." There's a junior varsity schedule even though Poly is not fielding a JV team this year. The latest "news" item is more than six months old. A "Merchandise" link leads to a dead-end Ebay page.
In short, this website gets a lot of things right, but it needs someone to go through and clean it up.
The football website is separate from school's, but there's a link from the school site that directs visitors to the right place. That's good.
Wilson
Grade: B-
Confusingly, Wilson football has two websites, with information on the team scattered across both.
Oddly, there is no link to the other site, lbwilsonfootball.com, which is labeled the "Official Home of Long Beach Bruins Football." This site contains a lot of information, but it's not well organized. There are brief bios of many of the coaches, but some some pages are blank and some links lead nowhere. There are no rosters.
The site appears to have been created by the Wilson boosters club, but it never directly says that.
Between the sites, a Wilson football fan can mostly find what he or she needs to know, but it's strange that you have to go two places.
Millikan
Grade: C
Anyone who goes to the Millikan High School website and looks at the football page will conclude that the Rams' football program was shut down after the 2016 season. The page contains only 2016 schedules, two photos and a video from 2015. Intriguingly, there is a link to something labeled as "Millikan Football Website," but if you click on it, you'll find an empty page with the notation, "The domain millikanfootball.org may be for sale."
So no more Millikan football? Well, not so fast.
A Google search leads to another site, www.millikanfootball.com, apparently created by the Rams' Booster Club. And it looks pretty good.
It has the 2017 varsity schedule right at the top; JV and freshman schedules are easily located, too. It has complete rosters for varsity, JV and freshman (pictures with the varsity), plus some good collections of pictures. Weirdly, all three "Coaches" pages (varsity, JV, frosh) are blank. Nor do the coaches' names, or contact info, appear anywhere else on the site.
It's a Jekyl and Hyde situation. If fans find the boosters' site first, they'll get most of what they want. But those who come to the school site first will go away with no idea that Millikan even has a football team. Why not place a link on the school page to send people to the booster club page?
Cabrillo
Grade: D+
The Cabrillo football site is dominated by a lengthy biography of Coach George Richardson. The 554-word bio isn't the only thing on the page -- no, there's also a large picture of Richardson at the top of the page. And to one side, there's a rotating slide show feature four more pictures of the coach, plus a picture of one of his high school football championship rings.
If you're a parent of a new player entering the program, it's nice to learn something about the coach. And with so many pictures of him, you'd have no excuses for not knowing what the coach looks like.
But hey, shouldn't the website have something about the, um, team? There is a link to the current schedule, in a PDF file. And at the bottom there's a link to a weirdly random collection of Cabrillo football pictures at the website MaxPreps. But none of those pictures are more recent than 2014.
There's no roster, no pictures of the current team, and no way to contact the coach. And no schedule for the JV or freshmen teams.
Compton
Grade: D
Go to the Compton High School website and click on "Athletics" and you'll be taken to a page that lists four sports. One of them is football. Click there and you get the current football schedule for the varsity, JV and freshman football teams. And that's it. That's the entire Compton football website.
At least the schedules are up to date and easy to find. But there is not even the name of the coach or a way contact anyone with questions.
Jordan
The Jordan Panthers' football website consists of team photos of the varsity, JV and freshman teams, plus the name of the coach, and links to Word documents containing games schedules. The schedules are for the current season, but bizarrely, they omit the team's first four games.
Lakewood
Grade: F
The Lakewood Lancers football website is notable mostly for what it doesn't have. It doesn't have a
schedule of games. It doesn't have the coaches' names or contact information. It doesn't have rosters or a single picture.
Worst, the site doesn't have any current information -- it is filled with outdated announcements about summer camp and practices.
Ironically, the page does contain a mission statement for the program which promises "a high quality, competitive, dynamic football experience." Too bad they have no interest in a high-quality web page.
Update, Sept. 11, 2017: Since this article was written, the Lakewood football website has greatly improved.
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See also: Who has the best baseball website in the Moore League?
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