By Jonah Rosenbaum
Fans hoping to receive scores of varsity sports games will now have to look no further than the networking site Twitter to get up-to-date news and scores. The Athletic Department has begun to “tweet” scores of games within minutes of their completion in an attempt to make it easier for students, parents and fans to stay connected with Harvard-Westlake sports.
“Harvard-Westlake has now gone real time in terms of getting results from games,” Head of Athletics Audrius Barzdukas said. “Our goal is to provide real-time results for varsity contests. We are always striving to improve communication with our community. We are going to start slow. We donât expect our coaches to Twitter results from their games or anything like that.”
“Outcomes from games will be sent to a central point where we can do something like a seven second radio delay, because we want to make sure that we donât Twitter that we just got jobbed by a referee or anything like that. The scores will be sent to Terry Barnum or Scott Bello, who is acting as our website administrator,” he said.
The two-week-old Twitter site had 51 followers and 55 updates at press time Monday. The site has featured scores from swimming, softball, lacrosse, baseball, tennis, softball, golf and track, as well as notifications on delayed starting times and changed location. Tweets on significant accomplishments (such as “Boys Track: Boys 4×400 Relay places first and sets school record”) can also be found.
Posts can come in the form of both texts and online messages. Although some sports simply have their final scores tweeted shortly after the gameâs conclusion, others are the subject of more frequent tweets; last Fridayâs 3-2 baseball loss against league rival Notre Dame was updated six times in the span of two hours.
To become a follower of the Twitter site, go to http://twitter.com/hwathletics.
