Sports-Minded Dopers: Come Play Free Online College B-ball with Me!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve been playing at SimSports for a few years now, and it’s an absolute blast. And we can always use more active coaches. Basically, you register and are assigned a team in a fictional league (with fictional players) where you compete against 255 other teams, most of them human-coached. The games are run three times a week, and each season takes about two real-time months. You do all your own recruiting, which is an important part of the game. I have about ten teams spread out over eight or so leagues (most of them under some variation of my Gadarene screen name). The message board is active and the sim itself is both fairly nuanced (lots of variations in coaching and recruiting strategy are possible, depending on how risky you want to be and the type of team you want to have) and easy to get a handle on.

Post here if you have any questions, or if you’ve decided to sign up - I can even give you some tips ‘n’ tricks about recruiting that will give you a decided leg up over other new coaches.

It’s tremendous fun.

2

This looks interesting. I’ll have a closer look and see if I can find the time to play. I am already in two hockey leagues so time is a concern.

3

It’s not a horrifically time-intensive game. I’d say that about an hour a week tops would be sufficient to run your program successfully, maybe two or three hours in the one week each season where you select your recruits. But the great thing about the game is that you can, essentially, spend as much time as you want. There are always new things to check out, and a number of excellent supplementary sites (providing additional stats, analysis, and recruiting numbers) have been built up around it.

Let me know if you end up joining, so I can look out for you!

4

I think this will go quite well with my whatifsports.com and simdynasty.com baseball teams.

The internet - now more than porn and email!

5

Excellent; let me know what team you end up with so I can give you a shout on the message boards and answer any questions you have.

6

I’m now in that 48 hour period that appears to be when I find out if/where I have a team.

Any hints would be much appreciated. Maybe we can end up in a league at some point.

7

You in yet, Mullinator? :slight_smile: Who’d you get?

8

I am finally in, although not until this morning. I still haven’t really perused stuff yet. I am called Youngstown Deep Hurting, League 00002, Conference 16. I’ll post more once I can get some time to figure out what I have.

9

Awesome! League 2 is a nice place, and it looks like your conference has some fairly strong and active coaches, particularly jmoore and stockdale. If you start a thread on the SimSports message board (in the League 2 forum), I’m sure they’ll welcome you aboard.

Come to think of it, the first place you should start, after you’ve perused the Instructions, is the message board, particularly the Common FAQs and the Newbie Info threads in the Coaching Advice/Newbies forum. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask them there. I’m also happy to help, and if you’d like to converse at length about strategy and stuff, post here or drop me an e-mail.

The good news is it looks like your team isn’t completely wretched. Your freshman class, particularly Stevens and Sarver, have great high school stats. Take this season and don’t worry about winning every single game; just experiment with your lineup and your settings and figure out what works best, both for you and for your team.

The baddish news is that you’ve joined League 2 fairly late, relatively speaking, in the season rollover cycle. Often coaches use their three preseason games as a way to test out their lineup and to do some initial scouting of recruits, but those games (and Game 1 of the regular season) have already been played. Tonight’s Game 2. This doesn’t matter much in terms of season success – like I said, take any win this season as so much gravy – but what it does mean is that you’re getting a pretty darn late start on recruiting, and recruiting’s the core of the game.

Fortunately, I’m a pretty experienced recruiter, so I can kinda walk you through this first time. There are a ton of different ways that you can allocate your recruiting points and scholarships (as a Small program, you get 68 RPs every week, with the remainder rolling over, and 14 scholarships total for the season). I’ve worked out my preferred manner of allocation, and I can tell you all about it if you want. Here are the basics for Week One:

  1. Scout out two or three players who look really good (impressive high school stats; maybe impressive scouted attributes) and who fit your needs (looks like mostly size this time around). Make sure that you match up decently with their preferences - that is, their Local preference is F or higher if they’re in your local regions (14, 15, 16, 17, or 18) and F or lower if they’re from elsewhere, their Winning preference is probably F- or lower, and their Impact preference is preferably G- or higher. These guys are your maxes. You’ll be putting 17 RP every week on them. An example of a possible max is Hoyt Hartlage of Conference 25.

  2. Now scout out, say, twenty players who look good-but-not-great (and who similarly fit your needs and have benign preferences). What you’re looking for here is mostly players who you (and hopefully others) wouldn’t max; guys who really aren’t good enough for anyone to put 17 RP a week on. Maybe their stats aren’t terrific, maybe their scouted attributes are awful, maybe they have some significant defect in their game. Make sure they’re still useful, though (in your case, that pretty much means being 6’7" or taller and having a pulse). This is your safety net. You’ll be putting 1 RP on each of these players in Week One. (I’ll tell you what to do in subsequent weeks a little later.) An example here might be Matthew Dorner from Conference 16.

  3. Finally, scout out around eight players - not too many more - who are even a little bit worse than your safety net guys. Again, try to pick players who won’t drop dead on the court, but definitely let your standards stretch and slip a little. These are the guys to whom you should offer a scholarship in Week One. For example, maybe Brendon Leitner of Conference 15 (although he might be at the bottom end of what you should consider, talent-wise).

I know that’s a lot of information - does it make sense? You need to have recruiting done by 5pm EST on Friday.

I hope I haven’t totally scared you away from this game… :slight_smile: I’d love to hear any questions, comments, or impressions you have.

10

Thanks for the notes. Based on available time and learning curve, I’ll be lucky to recruit better than a toaster and 3 week old dead cat, but I’ll give it a shot.

11

Hey, don’t knock toasters…they can be formidable forces in the paint.

Don’t worry too much about the learning curve; it’s steep at first, but it levels off real quickly. Recruiting’s much easier, and more fun, than I make it sound, when you get the hang of it.

Given your time constraint and if you don’t mind, I’m happy to lend a hand, recruiting-wise, your first time around. I’m a paying program, so I get a sortable Excel spreadsheet with all 768 recruits, their stats, and their scouted attributes. It makes recruiting a virtual snap.

For example, I tooled around on it for about twenty minutes and came up with some suggestions for your first batch of recruits. Feel free to go another way, of course, but this is here if you need it.

You need size and rebounding next year, so that’s what I went after.

Maxes

If I were in your shoes at Youngstown, I’d choose two of the following three players to max (put 17 RP on) every week:

Hoyt Hartlage, 6’10" C - El Paso, Tx. (Region 25)
Stats: 21.5 ppg 9.5 rpg 1.0 apg 1.8 spg 1.2 tpg 1.0 bpg
Projected attributes: GGPGFE (that’s shooting, defense, hands, rebounding, intelligence, and athleticism)

Enis Whitlow, 6’9" C - Hartford, Ct. (Region 3)
Stats: 10.5 ppg 10.5 rpg 1.5 apg 1.0 spg 1.0 tpg 2.2 bpg
Projected attributes: PEFEFG

Brad Robey, 6’10" C - Wilkes-Barre, Pa. (Region 3)
Stats: 9.2 ppg 7.5 rpg 2.2 apg 2.5 spg 1.5 tpg 3.0 bpg
Projected attributes: PEFGFF

I bet there’ll be around three other coaches on each of these guys, maybe less…giving you a fairly good shot at breaking a tie if you max two of them.

1 RP

Then I’d put 1 RP this week on the following players (region in parentheses):

I. Elliott (3)
B. Hoke (6)
T. Emrich (7)
M. Schultz (7)
O. Osborne (8)
E. Olson (10)
K. Stein (10)
L. Holland (10)
S. Jones (11)
T. Waldrop (12)
M. Cooper (13)
M. Dorner (16)
M. Bean (17)
D. Patel (17)
B. Witten (27)
D. Sutherland (27)
F. Weiter (28)
A. Nichter (28)
A. Timmons (29)
A. Rigdon (32)

Again, pretty good players, but not spectacular – there’s an excellent chance that you’ll have a lead on at least a couple of them when RPs are revealed after week three.

Scholarships

Finally, I’d put a scholarship down this week on the following eight players:

T. Grossman (5)
B. Leitner (15)
L. Gernert (18)
L. Halblieb (18)
C. Irving (19)
T. Raque (24)
G. Hoover (27)
G. Sells (28)

Uninspiring but potentially useful players. And when you need size, a 6’8" stiff is often acceptable.

Anyway, let me know if you have any questions about why I’d recruit these particular players. And tell me to shut up if necessary; I just like talking about this game. :slight_smile: