Sports on the Road: A guide to finding sports teams websites and webcasts
If you are away from your home area, do you think that you won't be able to keep up with your favorite sports teams? You don't have to go out and buy expensive TV satellite packages or constantly hang out in sports bars hoping they show your team. You can stay up to date because of the job many teams have done with their websites and live webcasts (real time local radio or TV broadcast received via the Internet).
Football
The National Football League (NFL) maintains it own website, and provides direct links to all of its teams home pages. From these homepages, teams keep up to date statistics, news items, roster moves, etc. Also, more than 90% of the teams in the league provide live game day webcasts from their local radio stations. Furthermore, next season the NFL has entered into an agreement with Yahoo! to provide more webcast coverage. The only teams that will not have local web coverage are the Washington Redskins, New York Giants, Tampa Buccaneers, and New England Patriots. This is due to agreements these teams have with their local radio affiliates prohibiting webcasts. However, as long as they are not playing each other, their opponents will being providing webcasts.
Baseball
Next is Major League Baseball (MLB). Even though every team has their own official website, the MLB homepage does not directly link to these sites. MLB maintains a page for each team and provides some unique and innovative web services. MLB also provides live webcasts of all home team radio broadcasts. Additionally, it provides a unique feature called Baseball Live. This multimedia application provides live pitch-by-pitch coverage of all games (sorry, no live video or audio feeds are provided at this time). Furthermore, the feature provides up to the minute lineups, box scores, and player statistics. In order to locate the official team sites, the best manner is to go to a search engine and type in the team name. On their official websites, each team should provide local radio broadcast access to their games with their live webcasts. You may also locate some very interesting fan maintained unofficial sites.
Hockey
The National Hockey League (NHL) provides individual team pages without links to any of the official team websites, just like Major League Baseball. Unlike baseball, the NHL does not have any web access to their games from the league site. It is up to each individual team whether or not they provide webcasts via their websites. To find the official team sites, you must also use a search engine, just as you must with MLB.
Basketball
Not everything on the Internet is free, and the National Basketball Association (NBA) proves that. For $29.95, any fan can access their Audio League Pass for the season. It provides live webcast access to every NBA game, regular and post season. The NBA has an official website that is the only website with official team information. There are no individual team-maintained sites available. The NBA is the first sports league that is in the process of providing fans with interactive TV access via the web.
Soccer
For fans of American soccer, you're out of luck if you're looking for any type of live Internet access. Major League Soccer (MLS) has an official website, but no teams have their own webpages. Neither the league nor the teams provide any webcasts.
As for minor league sports, most teams have websites, but few if any provide webcasts. There are some webcast sites out there that provide live access to small college sports and minor Division I college sports. There are even live webcasts available for some high school sports.
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