College Hoops: Digital ACC Preview - Team #5 Maryland

We continue our journey through the ACC in search of the best digital program. I hope you're enjoying the run through the conference with me. Thus far our journey has shown us #12 Boston College, #11 Miami, #10 Georgia Tech, #9 Virginia Tech, #8 NC State, #7 Wake Forest, and #6 Florida State.

Let's keep moving. This is the week we bring the ACC home.

#5. Maryland

Let's dive into the digital scouting report.

Strengths: Eye-Popping home page. Digital presence for the head coach. Foundation for regular interaction is set up.

Weaknesses: The communication is very erratic, in some places 2 seasons old. Tone feels really weird in places. Navigation is a little confusing.

The Details:

The UM athletics page has the most powerful home page we've covered yet, here. Large powerful image that rotates out (not always hoops), without the cluster of options thrown at you on many other schools' sites. But while there's a good amount of cool, there's also a good amount of confusing.

As you can see in the image below, they have a navigation that I think is made to be clear and simple -- to keep the focus on the main image. But it took me awhile to figure out how to choose a sport. For example, Basketball is "Bb". Baseball is "Ba". Not very intuitive. And, really, the focus of this home page should be to drive you into the sport you most care about.

The site features a fairly prominent, expanding upper navigation, which has absolutely no mention of sport. (I hunted for sport here for awhile!) There is a Fan Zone section that gives you access to the Maryland Podcast program.

Choosing Podcasts takes you to the image below. This is an athletics department compilation, as we've seen elsewhere -- so you can subscribe here, but if you do so, you get the full download by sport. There is no way to subscribe for Hoops only content.


When you do mouse over the "Bb", it becomes pretty evident this is Hoops. I do like the mouseover image (see below), as it gets you another powerful Terps Hoops visual. I just wish this navigation was easier to find and decipher.


Clicking into Basketball and you find a nice component, For Recruits, which I will show below. This is pretty solid - if you're a Recruit, you know where to go. (Recall we saw this with Miami, but the content was all football focused beneath it) They point you to the Coaches site, to Twitter, to Camps, to the Pros. Great, relevant pieces here. Now just add Podcasts and a video channel and we're moving!


Here's the full view of the Maryland basketball site, set up to elevate Terps video in the large window.


When you click on Gary Williams.com, you are greeted with a page here that says "do it all in Garyland." Wow. That is VERY weird. And I'm not sure the strategy is on Maryland brand. The coach should use this to sell his philosophy. His program. How he will help prepare you for the 'real world'... or who he's helped lead to the Pros. But instead, we see a main image (below) featuring Cal Ripken. I get it. He's an Iron Man. But he also isn't known for his hoops career. And it's not like Maryland hasn't cranked out some pros under Coach Williams. Given me a little Juan Dixon. Or a collage of Pros.

But, as you can tell by these images, I got the vibe that this is all about the Coach. And it left me with a feeling that the program was second, the coach first.


Then it gets even stranger. As you can see from this note from Coach Williams, he's getting close to ready for the 2007 season. (Obviously this hasn't been active in awhile). It's super tough to keep up to date, but I'm not getting the best vibe from Coach here. He either needs to pull this down or update it... I'd hope for the updating!


Which is weird, as Coach Williams is pretty active on Twitter, with roughly 2,900 followers, here. In fact, maybe it could be a simple update of that note from Coach that sets out what he hopes to share via Twitter and why you should follow him... linking of course to his feed, shown below.

There are a couple other ways to follow Maryland Athletics on Twitter: Maryland Athletics here with 28 followers and Assistant coach Keith Booth is here, with 381 followers.

Finally, I'll close my bizarre Maryland rundown with a link to distinguished alumni. (a simple text list shown on their site) It's an interesting idea -- show successful former students. High schoolers may not realize it yet, but your network is super important. And the U of M has done a nice job of turning out success stories. But a list like this with no context, no bio, no images, no reason you should care feels empty.


I feel pretty good about Maryland, just wish they'd finish what they started. (and update that coach's note, geez!)

Stay tuned for tomorrow as we break down the ACC's Final 4.

Andy