Welcome to Hoopville!
Hoopville was founded in the autumn of 2001 by a loose band of college basketball brothers. We decided to take our affinity for college basketball and share our considerable knowledge with the masses that were facing a shortage of quality copy to read in their cubicle during their lunch breaks. The masses have spoken, and thus, we present Hoopville.
We provide insights into the game we all love. Our goal is to deliver top-flight commentary, analysis, and honest and humorous editorials on the hoops game. We’ll wrap it up in March with exhaustive coverage of Championship Week, and of course the NCAA Tournament. There’s no rest for the weary, as in the spring we ramp up our recruiting and camp coverage, followed by the NBA Draft.
In Hoopville, we provide coverage of all NCAA Division 1-A conferences and Independents – that’s over 340 teams! How do we do this? We have a squad of highly motivated (and talented) basketball writers scattered across the nation, from Boston to LA, from Washington State to Orlando, and everywhere in between. Each of these Hoopville columnists and contributors are dedicated to bringing you the finest in college basketball writing.
That said, we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the you, our readers. This is your Hoopville, as well as ours. Feel we’re doing your team or conference an injustice? Let us know. Have a question or a suggestion? Bring it. We’re game. Communication with the Hoopville staff can be accomplished by visiting the Contact page. We want to hear from you!
A Little Bit of Hoopville Lore
The actual genesis of the site stemmed from an intra-office NCAA Tournament pool. I was initially pressed into service in March of 2000 to cover for a colleague who normally photocopied brackets and distributed them throughout the office. At the time I was getting into web development, so I posted the standings round-by-round on a website that all could access. In 2001, I decided to build an ASP-based web application for the staff as well as other employees on assignment out of the office, and actually posted content that today would be considered a “blog” before the term was common. Built with help from Barry Stahl of Copperbyte Consulting, it wasn’t the top-of-the-line ESPN Flash site, but it was pretty good. Heading into the 2001-02 college basketball season, I thought it would generate more interest to send out a monthly newsletter to provide some hoops news and analysis leading up to the tournament. A few days later, that idea had grown into a fully-fledged website, Hoopville.net.
We grew in size, content and exposure over the next few seasons. After several seasons, we started to outgrow our modest technical platform, so preparations were made to move to a more robust, larger environment. As the size of our database increased with excellent content, our servers began to crumble a bit. We would have occasional outages (especially during March Madness – which is totally not cool), and steps were made to ensure the future survival of the site. We have endured some rough patches in our history:
- Our hired fancy New York development firm dropped the ball on the “new Hoopville” in November 2008
- Our database was so unstable that it had to be re-booted hourly
- Our host was hacked, and recovery was impossible, leading to the site being down for several weeks
We re-launched with version 4.0 of the site in February 2009, just in time for Championship Week games, and our platform held together fairly well through the 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons.
In 2011, we had even more updates. Version 5.0 of Hoopville had a new platform, hosting environment, database, and three-column design. We had a change on the business front as well, as founder Andrew Flynn retired, selling controlling interest in Hoopville to Phil Kasiecki, who promised to guide Hoopville into its second decade with exciting new features, including hosting and sponsorship of our own Hoopville High School tournaments.
Things took an unexpected turn in the middle of 2018. Our host informed us that our database had grown too big to handle, and we were given very little time to do much about it. We opted to switch to a new host, and that was far from quick and seamless, but the end result is version 6.0 of Hoopville, with another new host and theme. There is more still to come.
Our new contact information is below. One thing is for sure – Hoopville will bring you the best of college basketball coverage, commentary, insight and analysis.
Thanks for the memories,
Phil Kasiecki
President and Director of Basketball Operations
October 2018
Editorial and Business Offices:
Hoopville Media Services, LLC
P.O. Box 940
Stoughton, Massachusetts 02072
