THREE YEARS LATER, STILL INTREPID DESPITE IT ALL

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

This website began operations in late September of 1998 with a cockamamie email address, a not-very-well-designed business card, and few contacts.

These days, the site is larger, the URL is owned until the year 2009, and The Founder seems to have become the authority on grass-roots play -- I have Brits and Aussies emailing me on where to find clubs in various parts of the United States.

While the spread and influence of this website has gone international, we still want to stay as hometown-friendly as we can. I still drop by the occasional playday or weekend hockey match -- college, scholastic, club, whatever -- and check up on how players are doing.

But heading into the fourth year of operations, three events threatened the existence of this informational fount.

The first was the bankruptcy filing of theglobe.com, which had purchased WebJump, the host of the TOTC front portal (that's the simple triptych you see when you type in "www.topofthecircle.com" into your browser).

After three frustrating weeks ironing out what to do, we finally got the website's portal up on DotEasy.com, a Canadian company which will hopefully not be as subject to the Silicon Valley market forces as others.

The second event that gave pause was the massive terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

My office in the Smithsonian Institution was just 1.2 miles away from the Pentagon. If the terrorists has been off in their aim with their terrible missile ... we'd hate to even think about it.

The third event was a massive tornado that killed two students at the University of Maryland on Sept. 24. The tornado, after wreaking a 10-foot-wide swath of devastation on campus, apparently jumped right over the neighborhood in College Park in which I live, before continuing on towards Beltsville and Laurel.

The scene of devastation on my little street was something out of an action movie: tree branches everywhere, wires down, and leaves blown through the narrow slats of prefabricated picket fencing.

Like the original Star-Spangled Banner at the Battle of Fort McHenry, this website is still here, a beacon for American field hockey.

But instead of being saluted, we would like to salute you, the readers, for keeping us going.

...And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!