I am sure all of you have been to the web sites for the Niles Daily Star, Dowagiac Daily News, Cassopolis Vigilant and Edwardsburg Argus by now.

I have heard both positive and negative feedback about the sites.

I personally like them. I think they look more modern and are easier to use than the old sites.

I am hoping that the archiving system is better than the previous sites because I fielded a lot of complaints about those.

We are in the process of transferring over the old archives, I hope that they will be finished with that soon.

It’s like they say; you don’t know what you got until it’s gone?

Well, we have learned here that no matter how we felt about the old archiving system, we used them a lot to research old stories.

What a bother that has become now that those archives don’t exist, at least for a while.

There are some features that I really like and there are more coming in the future.

One of the ones I like that is now available is an online form for football coaches to submit their information.

Whether they are Rocket Football level coaches or varsity coaches, they can fill out the form and submit it to me.

It looks kind of complicated, but it really isn’t.

And I don’t expect coaches to fill out every line, but they should be able to take just a few minutes to type in the information and send it off to me.
We are going to have an online form for youth baseball coming in the spring.
I have been after coaches and leagues to submit their game results with little or no luck.

I am hoping by making it easy to sit down at the computer for a few minutes they will send them in.

There is also a section for submitting photographs, which will appear in the web site.

Those photos can also be used in the paper.

Just fill in the information and send it along to us.

If you haven’t noticed yet, we are also posting sports stories to the web site as soon as I receive them from my writers or I can get the results typed up.

No more waiting around until 11 a.m. the next morning to read about your favorite team.

Like I said before, there will be other features coming, but since I don’t know when they will go into effect, I will leave it at that.

So if you haven’t spent much time on the site, head on over and check it out.
I think if you honestly give it a chance and don’t just say you hate it just because it’s different, I truly believe you will like it.

High School sports is now in full swing and there is no better place to follow Niles, Dowagiac, Brandywine, Edwardsburg and Cassopolis sports than through the Leader Publications web sites.

Scott Novak is sports editor of Leader Publications. He can be reached at scott.novak@leaderpub.com or by phone at 687-7702. Follow me on my daily blog: www.leaderpubsports.blogspot.com