Why no boys vb forum?

[Nick]

I asked John Tawa at prepvb and ss to set up a boys vb forum. His response was there's no interest. We get no respect.

[Heres a suggestion]

All you have to do is simply start up a topic on boys volleyball here and I am sure you'll get people posting responses on it. I am sure once again that people will add on to the topic since people here seems to know quite a lot of the current college men players mainly because they have been following their career since their HS days playing volleyball.

[hey guy]

Nick, just start a top ic of your own! Good luck!

[mino]

tawa is not a boys vb fan

[Jewel]

Is it true a lot of boys vb players are gay?

[Boys Forum Direction]

Guest-Jewel said:

Is it true a lot of boys vb players are gay?

It is true that the VB community is gernerally upbeat, if that's what you mean.

The best boy's forum is on the Volleyball Magazine site. You can find it at:
www.volleyballmag.com/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?az=list&forum=DCForumID3

This is a good forum for boy's information and discussion if you want to post something of interest to this group that is far more interested in college. The things they'd/we'd be interested in are discussions on say high school players who are good enough to play D-1 Men's VB, D-2, or club teams that are playing at national levels. That information allows projections to colleges and recruiting.

Try the URL I put above to discuss regular issues, especially So. Cal or regional issues, youth national team issues, state caliber players, etc.

Also, Tawa's site does have a Boy's Forum. It's not active at all though.

[Curious George]

is delgado dating lily kahumoku?

[IdahoBoy]

Guest-Curious said:

is delgado dating lily kahumoku?

How does this relate to the topic at hand?
Granted, many threads get off topic, but there is usually a correlation. i don't see this one, can you enlighten me?


I know the answer by the way.

[sweetieVBfan]

oh please please, IB, let the answer be no! let the nice lookin' puerto rican be single.

[Boys Forum Direction]

Guest-Nick said:

I asked John Tawa at prepvb and ss to set up a boys vb forum. His response was there's no interest. We get no respect.

Here's the Boy's forum on Tawa's site:
pub169.ezboard.com/fprepvolleyballfrm7

The reason there's no interest to discuss the boy's game there is because he does nothing to stimulate it. You can't even get to it unless you know the URL (which you now do). There's plenty of interest in talking the Boy's game, especially during club season and at the end of high school season. The boy's just don't gossip as much as do the girls, and the parents don't pimp their sons like the girl's parents do, so naturally there's less gossip to post. The boys just play the game.

Again, the best boy's forum is the Volleyball Magazine forum site. There are some good posters there if you don't make it juvenile. You can always ask good questions there and get some excellent feedback. Try it at: www.volleyballmag.com/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?az=list&forum=DCForumID3

[Rollshot]

Here's something that has bothered me just a tiny tiny bit. Way back when ...well, sometime last year... people on the old SS board (when Tawa was running the board) were inquiring and asking for a boys vb forum. Not everyone, mind you, just the boys vb fans. Then, some people overreacted and said, No! Bad idea! They will swear and cuss and cause all sorts of friction and chaos. That kind of thinking was silly, of course, because we all know that the girls vb posters do that already! People are people.

So, Tawa gets on the SS board, as he should as its appointed leader, and says basically, look, I'm not into boys vb, I don't know boys vb, and there's no fanbase (certainly not a large one like the girls vb), which is certainly disputable. Boys vb HAS a fanbase. Then he says, hey, I may think about putting up a boys vb forum because, shucks, you are MY people and I am your leader, er, um, board moderator, and I should serve you well. However, I have an ultimatum, er, I mean "condition." No... virginal sacrifices to the volcano ain't necessary. I will ask ... no, demand ... that if the boys vb forum, which I will create out of the magnanimous generosity of my heart as your dictator, er I mean board administrator, is not active with all sorts of witty and interesting posts (or, if you can't be witty or interesting, just act busy) then I will have no choice but to offer it as a lamb to the gods, i.e., press the "delete board" button.

I found this to be curious because when Tawa first ran the SS girls vb forum (his personal hobby and profession), it had virtually no traffic. He had to generate the traffic (to his credit) by posting under various aliases and having conversations with himself. He also put out articles and talked about those articles (under a different alias, which I always believed was cheating). Soon, with his dilligent efforts (and all props to him, I'll give him that), the traffic increased. He made the effort to generate the traffic on the SS girls vb forum. Yet ...and this is a strong "yet" ...he treated boys vb (as manifested in his thoughts on the boys vb forum) with little respect by giving its fans an ultimatum -- the boys vb board better be active or I'll cut your throats! No such ultimatum was delivered to the girls vb forum and in fact, he made sure to generate the activity on the girls vb forum. Granted, Tawa had an "out" because his employer SS magazine only covered girls vb. But why the ultimatum? He could've created the board (like he did at prepvb.com) and left it for people to noodle around in it ...or not. But, nooooo... He delivered an ultimatum.

I'm not saying he should create a boys vb board. I'm not saying he should personally generate interest in said board after it's been created. After all, he's entitled to do whatever the hell he wants to do, just like everyone else. But why the ultimatum?

I found all of that curious.

[About Tawas Site]

I read that situation exactly as you did.

I had personal emails with him about it. He convinced me he was essentially a one man band, had already taken on far more than one man could handle with the girls and had no time for the boys.

Why the ultimatum? Good question. I think by then he'd already convinced himself that he had no resources to cover the girls that the whole boy's scene was not just secondary, but a social minority in his mind. I can see how people can get that impression since there are so many more girls playing than boys. The boy's just don't have the need for a gossip outlet like the girls apparently do. But the boy's and their parents need a place they can go to ask questions, get advice on colleges, programs, and coaches, find out about signing deadlines, NCAA & Clearing House rules, National Letters of Intent issues, National Team assignments and plans, Junior Olympic travel plans, and many more legitimate issues. They just don't care to trump up the hit numbers by discussing hair scrunchie designs or spandex cuts.

[vb43]

Seems to me, the boys could pretty much take over the SS message board as there are so few posts on it anymore!

[OC Homer]

There's no reason this forum can't represent boys and HS Vball. It's in need of new blood and new perspectives. Some attempt was made under the SoCalHSVBall topic but there was very little response. VBall magazine's forum is now more directed to boys VBall but seems to get a lot more traffic from the east coast. They have posted the names of the Fab 50 from the east and midwest, leaving out the west coast. I'm sure when we find out the names omitted from this list there will be at least some controversy. I question the timing as the so cal HS season is only 1/2 way done. New stars may yet arise.

[Rollshot]

Guest-About said:

The boy's just don't have the need for a gossip outlet like the girls apparently do.

I think I have to disagree with you on this one point. Boys can be just as catty as the girls. But you are certainly right that boys (and their parents and coaches) need an outlet to vent, pontificate, gossip, and ask questions.

Here's a short history lesson. When you read the following, you will get the impression that I am taking total credit for the explosion of boys vb chatter on the vb mag forum ...and you are right. Bear with me.

When rollshot.com was active, we (or "I") monitored all the boards for gossip, info, and basically get a feel for the "pulse" of the internet vb community. On all the major boards (Volleyball 24/7 (before it became Volley Talk), Student Sports, Volleyball Magazine forum), the talk centered around girls and womens vb. There were also other boards like Volleyball.com which was very inactive and Rec.sports.vb on the Google network which had mostly instructional chatter but hardly any gossip. There was also cvu.com which had a lot of immature posts from east coast non-Div I men's vb. Very strange to say the least. The most popular, however, were Student Sports and Volleyball 24/7 (now VolleyTalk). Volleyball Magazine had a forum but hardly anyone posted. It was a ghost town.

We at rollshot.com set up a link to each of these boards to make sure our readers had a place to air their vb grievances, so to speak. During the women's vb season in 2001, the Volleyball mag forum was still a ghost town. Only a few posted and it was mostly about girls and women's vb.

In early 2002, we started to focus on men's and boy's vb as we generated one article after another. Around the same time, concurrent with our coverage of the men's and boy's game, the Volleyball Magazine forum started to light up. The timing was uncanny. The discussion centered around boys vb and in particular, the LBC (Darrick Lucero's Long Beach vb club) and its wealth of boys vb talent. This was no mere coincidence. We contacted and featured many boys who were associated with Lucero's club as well as boys who competed against the LBC. As we featured boys and men's vb out in the midwest and east, the posts on the Volleyball Mag forum mirrored that of our coverage. You might be thinking, oh, rollshot probably posted all those posts. Uh, no... We did not post on any board except for the old SS board and we rarely talked about rollshot.com. We merely posted to have fun with and toy with vb mothers/fathers.

What happened was, after alerting the boys/mens vb community about our site, the boys/mens fanbase recognized that SS and Volleyball 24/7 were populated by girls and womens vb fans when they clicked on the links to those boards. With nowhere else to turn, they focused on the deserted VB mag board. There may be other reasons. Perhaps it was plain luck when one of the boys/mens fans decided he was going to post there instead of SS or VB 24/7. I don't know.

Whatever the reason, the talk escalated as we covered more and more of the boys/mens game.

Around that same time, more and more men's/boy's vb personalities started to email us and talk about the great vb mag forum and how great it was that we set that up! We told them that vb mag owned that forum, not us. We just linked to it. But, as we got more and more data points about internet behavior, the more we realized the vb mag forum lit up primarily (or almost exclusively) because of what we covered. We even generated an article of some kid located far away to test our theory. Sure enough, as soon as that article was published, posts about that boy's club popped up everywhere in the vb mag forum.

We noticed other things, too. Guys like Blake Cantrell, who is apparently the new vb reporter for SS, sent us an email (this is how we found out his nickname was the Octaroon) to propose a few things to us, one of which was to feature him in an article. We were wondering to ourselves -- who the f*** is Blake Cantrell? Shortly thereafter, Octaroon posts started popping up in the vb mag forum. They were either posts by the Octaroon or posts about the Octaroon. When we saw that, as well as the hundreds of other posts about people we featured, we just looked at each other, snickered, and then wondered, what have we created?

There might be another explanation for what happened, but I don't believe in coincidences. The timing was just too uncanny!