By Elohino Theodore
GoEags offers students easy access to athletic department information.
Just a few years old, Eastern Washington University’s athletics website offers information regarding sports at EWU.
GoEags.com is currently in their third year of their redesigned website. Director of athletic marketing and sales, Kyle Hoob, explains that the site started out as an idea from four people including himself in the athletic department.
“There was about four or five of us that kind of sat down and started researching the main companies, and contacted them, and asked for examples. And then we started just going through and looking at our wish list on what would we like our Eastern athletics template to look like,” Hoob said.
Hoob explained that figuring out a template and building goeags.com lasted for about eight months. “It takes about five steps to do it. You do all your research, and then you start handwriting down literally what you want in a website,” Hoob said.
The athletic department also talked to a few EWU coaches, as well as athletic director Bill Chaves, asking for opinions and other ideas they would like to see on goeags.com.
Hoob also explains how the staff came up with the background for the website. “We asked a ton of people, [because] you don’t want to make [the background] sports specific. So we thought, ‘What, right now, is the number one tool that all the fans are thinking about?’ The red turf,” Hoob said.
According to Hoob, even though the red turf is exclusively used for EWU football games, it also is one of the many identities of EWU. Therefore it made sense to have it as the background for the website. The athletics department is striving to make goeags.com a website with very few errors. “We want to be great at our website, not just be good,” Hoob said.
There are two main pieces that make up the website: the marketing aspect and the sports information aspect. The sports information staff focuses on statistics, rosters, pictures, latest scores and history for various Eastern sports. The marketing and multimedia staff focus on making sure that the sponsors get updated.
Marketing and multimedia are also in charge of ticket information for games and events.
The athletics department has Tim Shustoff in charge of corporate sponsorships. His job is to sell sponsorship packages to companies. Sponsorships packages consist of companies having their name on the goeags website, inside of Reese court and on, or near, Roos field. Goeags.com deals with companies like Pepsi, Bi-Mart and Northern Quest Resort and Casino.
Assistant sports information director and social media coordinator, Kyle Bruce, explains what he does behind the scenes for the website. “I am the liaison between the media groups that cover Eastern Washington sport teams,” Bruce said.
Bruce is also responsible for writing releases on the latest EWU sports that he is in charge of, updates the schedules and rosters on the website for the sports team he works with.
Bruce goes on to further explain his duties on goeags.com. “I’m responsible for sending out statistics to opposing teams, the Big Sky conference, [and] media members that need it,” Bruce said.
“So anything like that that’s on the website that you see about a specific game or event or schedule or roster, that’s my job,” Bruce said. He also talks about the challenging part of his job on the website. “I would say I have been really trying to create a video emphasis, getting a lot of video on the website,” Bruce said.
With the website having so many characteristics, Bruce and Hoob have their own thoughts about what they like about goeags.com. “If you go to our website on your phone, it displays correctly, all of the information is there,” Bruce said.
“I think when we did this; we think that it’s pretty functional. For goeags and our fan base, we think it’s pretty effective, yet simple and easy to navigate,” Hoob said.
