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Hello Again Everyone



Jim Kvisto of Hurley sent me an e-mail updating me on things in his neck of the woods where they've had lots of snow lately and he figures it has out them back two to three weeks.



There's snow and plenty of it forecast for the southern third of the state as well.



There are plenty of scores posted for games this week, though. Take a look at the website and you'll see them. Here are some notable ones from the ones that have been submitted. Menasha beat Appleton North at Appleton North; SPASH beat Merrill, Winneconne nipped WLA; Mayville is now 5-0; Denmark 2, Southern Door 1; Sturgeon Bay 2, Luxemburg-Casco 1;Algoma 3, Oconto 2 all from the Packerland;



Another report of a kid slipping and falling hard on home plate with rubber/plastic cleats on -- the sixth such reported incident this year thus far. No serious injuries from those falls -- YET! Keep those reports coming in. I believe there are now more people that you think who realize what many of us realized a long time ago.



Sevastopol softball has a battle going on there. The community field there is a grass infield and they've been playing their games at a nearby diamond. They've been trying to get the community leaders to skin the infield so they can play there games in town. It's been an ongoing struggle. They've been keep me up to date on the process. There was a meeting tonight to address the situation. The kids on the team have been forced to fund raise in order to play their games on a skinned infield nearby but having to come up with that kind of cash every year will be tough. The rulebook doesn't state that the infield must be skinned, it states that the best way is to skin it.



My daughter and I are going to be working on The Fastpitch Chronicle website in the near future. We are going to be dressing it up a bit and making it a little more user friendly and cosmetically better. Gerri Hansen, former Marshall coach has invested in a great digital camera and has promised to forward some pictures she takes as she travels around the state watching games. If you have some digital pictures you'd like to submit once we get the site re-modeled that will be great. I'll let you know when we're ready to embark on that kind of stuff.



For the most part, readers like reading material. I published the world's largest fastpitch newspaper for 14 years. It was the largest fastpitch publication of any kind ever in the world. I had pictures but the readers just wanted to read as much as they could. Pictures, they said were nice but not if they took up the space that a great article could use.



I now have more than 1900 e-mail addresses on the mailing lists. There is a good chance that I will start using RSS in the near future. RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) feeds are free content feeds from Web sites, and would include fastpitchchronicle.com, that contain article headlines, summaries and links back to full-text articles on the web.



Benefits and reasons for using RSS

RSS is an easy way for you to be alerted when new content that interests you appears on your favorite websites. Instead of repeatedly visiting a particular web site to browse for new articles, RSS automatically tells you when something is posted online. Via a news reader, RSS automatically retrieves summaries of the latest content from the sites you are interested in similarly to the way your e-mail software regularly checks for new e-mail.



When we move that system -- I'll let you know and let you know what you have to do to take advantage of it.



We've had over one million visitors to The Fastpitch Chronicle since 2005. That's a lot of people and visits. We want to expand it even more though. Tell your friends, the players on your team, the other parents in the stands and anyone interested in the game. The website really does have a lot to offer.



I was looking at the WIAA tournament brackets and noticed that there are only 95 teams in Division 4 for 2007. That is a low number, the lowest of all the divisions. I'd be willing to be that there are some teams out there that are pretty good but are some of the very smallest in D-3 that would like to be in D-4. I see by reading the minutes of the Softball Coaches Advisory Committee minutes they suggested the WIAA even things out by dividing the number of bottom teams (D-3 and D-4) in half to even things out. I'm not sure how that moved along through the political process within the WIAA last fall. If you know, let me know so everyone then knows.



That's about it for tonight.



Actually, that is it so

as always

Keep it Rising

Bob