ALL IS WELL ENTERING YEAR EIGHT

By Al Mattei
Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

As this website enters its eighth season of operations, it is time to pause to remember what things were like when this site started.

Back then, the World Wide Web was just getting out of being an exclusive 65-page club which included the Harvard swim team. Downloads were done with a little something called an FTP, through dialup lines which maxed out at 14,400 bits per second. You felt lucky to type in the right code at the right time of day if you wanted to get a new font for your word processor.

The term "Firewire" had disappeared from the voices of many enthusiasts since being introduced at a convention in 1995.

But eight years later, the World Wide Web has turned into its own incredible universe.

Wireless Fidelity (also known as WiFi) connections had made it possible to surf the web outdoors and has rendered dialup and even cable connections obsolete.

Billions of pages from tens of millions of websites in all languages feed an information age that seemed unimaginable even in the early days of the Netscape web browser.

The Web is a place of ideas, products, information, talk, and, frequently, the broken flotsam of web products that have gone out of business or of personal homepages which never got updated past the first installment.

The technology is such that we have been tempted to abandon one of our first principles, one that places server speed above all else. But I still believe that, in order to not discriminate against rural areas with slower connections, this site needs to remain built on simple architecture.

But the same is not true for the second website started this year, Right To Right Is Right, our head-injury reduction campaign. We know that young people love to download, whether it is songs, pictures, or other items. We have uploaded the first sport-specific downloadable flipbook for an iPod Photo. We have plans for adding short videos as well as QuickTime VR images to illustrate and enhance our content.

That's why TopOfTheCircle.com, in the last year, has made one podcast and has plans for two more.

I believe that the American field hockey community and its youth programs, like this site, are very healthy indeed. National team-caliber talent is being developed in the schools, the rules of NCAA field hockey are moving ever closer to those of the international game, and the spread of artificial pitches and hockey-specific stadia are creating a true field hockey infrastructure.

And yet two spasms of retirements in the high schools -- one after the 2001 season and one after the 2005 season -- has resulted in the loss of almost a quarter of a millenium of field hockey coaching experience and a great gross or two of coaching wins.

The loss of experience is not limited to the high-school coaching ranks; we, as a nation, have also lost the two longest-serving local field hockey writers since the end of the 2003 season.

But we still intend to burn a narrow focus on high-school field hockey going forward. It is still our mission to tie together the national grass roots -- schools, developmental programs, clubs, umpiring chapters -- and give them best-practices information and trends in order to allow every player and team the opportunity to improve themselves through information.

And we thank those who have helped along the way: our network of reporters throughout the United States, Yahoo, AOL, DotEasy, Google, Apple, Volvo, and Verizon.