This spring marks the fifth anniversary of Yahoo! Sports’ acquisition of the Rivals.com business. It’s a big milestone, and one I’m very proud of as the head of Rivals.com. So I want to share with you where we’ve been along the road, where the business is now, and where it’s going. Rivals.com is a subscription product that blends content and community. Our business offers a place for hard-core football and basketball recruiting fans to consume, discuss and share content and analysis about their favorite teams.

Rivals.com is a consortium of 160 local team sites, including Orangebloods.com, TheWolverine.com, Warchant.com, TideSports.com, IrishIllustrated.com and more.

This incredibly engaging mix of content and community tools for avid fans is why Yahoo! initially partnered with—and ultimately acquired—Rivals.com.

At the core of the deep slate of free and premium content we deliver to Rivals.com subscribers is our Prospect Recruiting Rankings. The ranking of the country’s best high school football & basketball players via the Rivals100, Rivals150 and Rivals250 dates back to the 2002 recruiting class and is highlighted by a decade’s worth of current and future NFL and NBA players first ranked and discovered by Rivals.com—that’s a lot of players, and the result of a lot of hard work.

Rivals.com also has the most in-depth Recruiting Database available, with more players, photos and videos of top high school prospects than any other site, once again dating back to 2002. Subscribers to Rivals.com can look back and follow the recruiting process of numerous current NFL players like Adrian Peterson, Percy Harvin or Tim Tebow.

Similar to our player rankings, we deliver historical, accurate and in-depth Team Rankings dating back to Texas’ No. 1 class with Vince Young in 2002, which won a national title. In fact, one of the things we’re so proud of is that each team ranked No. 1 in the annual Rivals Team Rankings after National Signing Day went on to win a national championship within the next few years of that ranking. Texas (ranked No. 1 in 2002), LSU (2003), USC (2004, 2005 and 2006), Florida (2007) and Alabama (2008 and 2009) won national titles in large part because of their recruiting effectiveness, and our rankings speak to that. No other site can boast such accuracy.

Exclusive video is another key Rivals.com offering, and a big draw for any football recruiting fanatic like myself. If you want to see a player such as Andrew Luck, the likely No. 1 pick in the upcoming NFL Draft, work out at a U.S. Army All American Bowl practice, a NIKE camp or the VTO Camp, Rivals.com is the place for amazing video of today’s college and NFL stars back in their high school days.

Our video is part and parcel of the huge amount of multi-media content that Rivals.com produces.As most everybody knows, Yahoo! Sports Radio launched in August 2011, and we are broadcast by 200 radio stations across the country, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Rivals.com has its own radio show six days a week: Rivals on Yahoo! Sports Radio, which is a three-hour nightly show that gives our network of 300 publishers and staff a chance to discuss recruiting and team site coverage. Each player, coach, and analyst audio interview is available online on the Rivals.com network.

I don’t mean to brag (ok, maybe a little), but it’s no secret that Rivals.com produces far more national, regional and local content than the competition. In the first two months of 2012 alone, the Rivals.com football recruiting team has produced 1,178 stories –an average of more than 18 stories per day. In that same time span, our video team has produced nearly 250 original videos, mostly writers and analysts providing commentary on certain player signings, coaching changes or spring football, in addition to the enormous volume of player highlights we’ve secured.

Rivals.com also has the distinction of being a selection partner with the U.S. Army All American Bowl, the premier football all-star game in the country, helping select the 100 players. If you’re not at the game, or don’t catch it live on NBC, Rivals.com gets exclusive access to the 700 recruits and all events so we can bring you the most in-depth coverage. Our team produced 250 editorial pieces and 120 original videos over a seven-day stretch this past January’s event (combined and all-star game).

Looking ahead, in the next two weeks, I will be proudly announcing the first-of-its-kind Rivals-branded Football Camp, the premiere camp and combine focusing on the Rivals100 and Five-Star recruits. I hope you’ll stay tuned for the announcement.

With the content value of this deep slate of offerings and its pay wall business model, Rivals.com is re-shaping the sports “premium content” business. Rivals.com has proven to be an incredibly unique offering for Yahoo! that no competitor has replicated and we continue to grow our paying audience year over year—and I am honored to be managing a fantastic group of professionals.

Thanks,
Eric Winter

Senior Director, Sports & Entertainment

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series entitled, “In My Own Words,” on Yodel Anecdotal that gives employees the opportunity to share their own stories about Yahoo!. Feel like yodeling your own? Post your Yahoo! story on your social networks using the hashtag #myYahoostory.