Major Change Coming to Nebraska Prep Volleyball on Aug. 3
It’s hard to believe, but Nebraska Prep Volleyball is about to start its third year of extensive coverage of high school and club volleyball in Nebraska.
In August of 2013, it took a pretty good leap of faith to trade in the comforts and stability of corporate life to pursue a passion which required living outside of my comfort zone and dealing with some instability along the way. In the months since, I have been truly blessed by the incredible amount of support from my wife and children, a core group of friends which helped shove me into that leap of faith and continue to push me and from the thousands of volleyball players, coaches, parents and fans across the state and wonderful sponsors. It’s been an incredible ride.
Berk BrownAbout six months after Nebraska Prep Volleyball was formed, a sister company – NebraskaPrepRecruiting.com – was born because of the huge void that exists in helping athletes and their families navigate the recruiting process. We are blessed that many athletes have chosen us to help them achieve their desire to play in college. It’s hard to believe, but we have a 100% success rate of our athletes moving on to play in college. This has been a great endeavor as well and fits our core mission of helping promote the sport, athletes and teams.
Last November we launched the most successful high school volleyball-recruiting combine in the state’s history. More than 100 athletes participated with nearly two dozen college coaches in attendance. Again, this stays true to our core mission of helping promote the sport, athletes and teams. Look for more information on the 2015 combine in coming weeks.
Earlier this year – despite the best efforts of Mother Nature to stop us – we hosted the first Nebraska Prep Volleyball Invitational for club teams. For its first year, it was a great success. Unfortunately, Nebraska is in the midst of issues in the club world that prevent some clubs from playing each other because of different national affiliation. As an independent entity, we were able to bring teams from both groups together to play. Again, this was something that fits our core value of promoting the sport, athletes and teams. The 2nd Annual Nebraska Prep Volleyball Invitational will take place in early 2016 with more information to be released in the coming weeks.
It was last year about this time that we overhauled the Nebraska Prep Volleyball website to have a cleaner, better, more professional look. We also began offering premium content for an annual subscription rate of $29.99 a year. Unsure of what the response would be, it was very humbling when hundreds of people subscribed – another sign of the incredible support the volleyball community provides and the passionate fan base in Nebraska.
The passion showed by our supporters is incredible. In this short period of time, we have become the third largest high school volleyball website, trailing only nationally recognized PrepVolleyball.com and LoneStarVolleyball.com – which is dedicated to covering the sport in Texas. It’s the intention of Nebraska Prep Volleyball to surpass those good people in Texas this year, however. We only trail LoneStarVolleyball.com by roughly 800 followers on Twitter and we are on schedule to pass them by the end of the year. I am very thankful to our fan base for such a loyal following. Besides, we can’t let Texas be better than us at anything, can we?
PrepVolleyball.com and LoneStarVolleyball.com both do a tremendous job at what they do. Probably the biggest difference between those sites and NebraskaPrepVolleyball.com is that those sites require a subscription for roughly 95% of their content – whereas our site only requires a subscription for maybe 25% of our content. The other big difference is in their staff. Actually, just the fact that they have a staff makes them different than NebraskaPrepVolleyball.com – which is just a one-man show.
After much contemplation and consultation with respected people in the volleyball and business world, it was decided that in order for NebraskaPrepVolleyball.com to continue to grow and provide more – and better – content, something needed to change.
As a result, effective a week from today – Monday, Aug. 3, 2015 – NebraskaPrepVolleyball.com will move to a subscription-only website. The subscription rate will remain at $29.99 a year, which is the same annual price charged by the other two major high school volleyball sites. Also, there are websites in Nebraska for major boys high school sports – which have I great love and respect for – which have an annual subscription rate of $79.99.
In the past 12 months, we have had an amazing 42,000+ unique visitors to our website. Last week alone more than 3,100 unique visitors visited the website – and July is suppose to be the slow time of the year! The amount of love and passion Nebraska volleyball fans have for the sport is truly unbelievable. The move to a subscription-only platform for the website will help in our effort to continue to raise our level to that of the fans.
As always, we will be sending out tons of info and updates on our Twitter account of @NebHSvolleyball as well as on our NebraskaHSvolleyball Facebook page. We also have a Nebraska Prep Volleyball YouTube channel where we will be posting A LOT of videocasts moving forward. Enjoying our coverage on those social media platforms will obviously continue to be free.
Words truly cannot express the gratitude we have for the support the volleyball community has given us. From a personal standpoint, I feel that I get more from the volleyball community than I could ever give back. I’m truly blessed to have formed so many great relationships in the last couple years. I love the fact that there are so many great, great people associated with the sport. I love being on a first-name basis with those funky cats on the North Platte volleyball team, getting random out-of-the-blue emails of appreciation from classy parents at Omaha Marian, seeing the occasional athlete wearing a Nebraska Prep Volleyball t-shirt while out and about and the opportunity to tell the stories of incredible kids and athletes from the smallest of towns in Nebraska.
I hate to date myself, but my first paying job in journalism came in the summer of 1990. I’ve been very fortunate and blessed in the looooooong time since, having covered Husker football & basketball, writing for ESPN.com, sitting courtside at NBA and NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four games, walking the sidelines of NFL games and meeting and getting to know some great people along the way. I’m so old that I covered Jordan Larson in high school as well as the guy who has earned the save in the last two MLB All-Star games – Glen Perkins of Minnesota. And then there was the time I spilled a cup of Coke in my lap in the Memorial Stadium press box while having a conversation with some new football reporter for ESPN named Pam Oliver. Ya, I’m that old. And that clumsy.
All that having been said, I’ve never enjoyed my professional career as much as I have the last two years and I have the volleyball community to thank for that. So, thank you to everyone that has supported Nebraska Prep Volleyball in a variety of ways the last two years. It’s because of that support that I’ve been able to start developing ideas of how we will celebrate the 5th, 10th and 25th anniversaries of Nebraska Prep Volleyball.
It’s been a great run so far, but the best is yet to come!