Basketball Statistics Blog

eBA Stats Group Marks 10 Years on the Web

Our First Year on the Web...
Ten years ago this evening, on 24 December 1998, 20:00 GMT, I pressed a really scary big button in an old 386 Computer and the eBA-Stats.com website went online for the first time. This site was the first site of the actual eBA Stats Group and from a start of hits numbered in the thousands, the site now gets almost 10 million hits a year...

The second birthday...
During 1999, the eBA-stats.com web site, which has been built as a Basketball in general and Statistics in particular labor of love, took its first steps onto the World Wide Web with the aunch of the forums, the clinics and the directories sections. ......

Our third candle...
It’s weird and unworldly to imagine the Web when we started this site. Yahoo started about 1994. Google appears just with us. Nobody worried about PageRank back then, but we were quite pleased to be listed from the first days in all the Internet Directories. Netscape 1.0 was released in December 1994, and Internet Explorer first appeared in 1995......

The fourth celebration...
The site boasted a number of online-only features: a basketball store, a forum where basketball people could post questions and answers and debate about basketball statistics analysis, and a link for readers to comment on case studies and send feedback to the editor.......

During the following years on the Web...
Though our original web page at geocities and xoom ( http://www.geocities.com/allstats/index.html ) - with the "famous" bouncing basketball... - are probably lost to the winds of time, here's a version of our page from the first years... sorry about the design !

Thanks to the Internet Archive and reliving one’s formative years, here's what the site looked like in eBA Stats 2002 and eBA Stats 2004 as well ! ......

Four years ago...

While the history of eBA-Stats is a well-covered topic throughout the site, the impact of the network age, which coincidentally began around the same time our analysis system was released, even today, year 2008, it's difficult to measure, but also something to reflect upon and celebrate in tandem with eBA's birthday: the eBA Stats Group was born !

The eBA-Stats.com® Group - Portal in eBA-Stats.com ~ Forums in eBAforums.com ~ Encyclopedia in eBAwords.com ~ Clinics in eBAclinics.com ~ Blogs in eBAblogs.com & eBA Store -
begins to become a primary source of information and services for basketball coaches at the game statistical analysis area. In these years of professional life, the eBA-Stats.com® Group became the quickest and modern road to that information

The candle number 8...
The eBA-Stats.com® site started as a one-site-10 pages labor of love, has grown beyond all expectations: today the eBA Stats Group is comprised by 5 sites and more than 15.000 pages (and still counting...) !

It is still a labour of love, and its popularity due to YOUR SUPPORT means that each month approximately four million pages are viewed !
Therefore we needed to migrate ( second time in one year...! ) to a new, best and exclusive VPS server, including a dedicated IP, which assured us a 100% uptime for the last years !

Nowadays...
Ten years later, I am taking a few moments for a deep breath and a little reflection: eBA-Stats.com® Group is one of the largest non-commercial & bilingual basketball statistics analysis group websites in the world...!

To close anyway this celebration, thanks to Yahoo,
we invite you to fun little Flash retrospective,
where Yahoo revisits 100 memorable icons and events from the
last 10 years of the web... Enjoy !

Happy Birthday, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year !

eBA-Stats.com® Group wishes to everybody,
our publishers, editors and registered members,
our friends coaches participants in the courses and clinics,
our advertisers and sponsors,
our readers and thousands of daily guests,
our families, colleagues and personal friends...

( clicking here you can read it in all the languages spoken in our basketball statisticians community .... )

A Happy Birthday, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year !

May the season bring you joy and good cheer!

Onward ! ...

Our first ten years were about finding a voice, an audience, and a cause worth fighting for.
Please join us for what comes next.

We are together today, see you tomorrow !


...by the way, ten years ago also, on September 27 1998, Google, with three employees - Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Craig Silverstein, began life in a friend's garage...