Aug. 17, 2010

Click here to purchase hard copies of the fact book or the fan experience guide

The Athletic Media Relations and Athletic Video departments worked at a frantic pace this summer to create a Fact Book as well as a virtual fan experience yearbook, which have launched today.

The virtual guide features over 30 videos and slide shows to give fans more of an interactive "media guide." Additional videos can be loaded throughout the year and each of Memphis' sports will have its own interactive fan guide.

The web-based guide was created in response to new NCAA legislation that mandated that media guides could no longer be provided to recruits or anyone associated with the coaching of a recruit as of August 1.

"We decided to take the budgeted money used for printing and mailing mass quantities of guides and create several projects that would continue to be of interest to media, fans, recruits, etc.," said Jennifer Rodrigues, assistant athletic director for media relations.

In addition to the virtual guide, each sport will have a Fact Book, which is being designed specifically for local, regional and national media to cover the Tigers. The Fact Book is similar to the traditional media guide, but many of the photos and recruiting info was removed to cut down on the number of pages. The books will be printed in smaller quantities to save money as well as to cut the amount of guides that were left over at the end of each sport season.

"We are very fortunate that Darby Dunnagan and her staff of videographers were on board from day one to help provide all of the videos for this project," said Rodrigues. "She and her staff did a tremendous job of creating highlight videos that really make this guide so entertaining. Many of the videos were created by assistant director Christopher T. Duty and interns Arreon Parks and K'rame Lewis. We also appreciate the video assistance we received from our intern Allison Schatell as well as Running Pony and Marty Duell in the communications office across campus"

Assistant Media Relations Director Brandon Kolditz is creating the virtual yearbooks for each sport, which also includes creating flash animation as well as overseeing the multi-media production. Kolditz, whose media guide designs netted two CoSIDA Best Cover awards this past year, created the guides through Zmags software and also used the Adobe Suite collection.

"Without Brandon being so eager to learn all of the technological steps needed to create this guide, I would not have been so confident in knowing that we could roll the first guide out, starting with football," said Rodrigues. "The NCAA legislation was decided in late April, which gave us only about three months to pull everything together. Brandon did a tremendous job on the football project and is working day and night to get the volleyball and men's and women's soccer virtual guides out in the next couple of weeks."

Fans who would like to purchase a copy of the Virtual Fan Experience and/or the Football Fact Book can do so through the Official Publications Store, which is being handled by PPI Sports, Inc. Each guide will cost $20 each plus shipping. The printing and mailing of the books is being handled by PPI. The books will be printed similar to past media guides with four color covers and perfect bound. The fact book has full bios and a full history/record section, while the fan experience book has more pictures and would be more like a coffee table book.

In addition to the two guides for each sport, the Athletic Media Relations office is also creating a recruiting website that will be launched in the next month. Running Pony Productions is handling many of the videos for the site and local advertising agency Inferno is handling all of the design.

"With the money saved on printing, we were also able to create a website that would reach out to prospective student-athletes and their parents," said Rodrigues. "This has been another challenging project, but one that I believe our coaches will be proud to send recruits to for information about academics, the University, the city, facilities and much more."

2010 Memphis Football Fact Book