The Pierce College athletic department is making a change, but it won’t be seen on the field, it will be online.
The department is working on changing their online platform to a new website.
Genice Sarcedo-Magruder, dean of student services and equity and the acting athletic director, said that the athletic department has been contracting with PrestoSports and Presto, to completely redo the sports website for Pierce. This new website will be separate from the PierceCollege.edu website.
It will allow the sports program to update rosters and statistics better, highlight athletes of the week, teams doing well, connect to social media and more, according to Sarcedo-Magruder.
Sarcedo-Magruder said that Presto is a commonly used platform for different college sports programs because of the different opportunities it has.
“It is fairly common for college athletics to have the Presto website, because it just gives us more options that are specific to athletics that a regular college website does not necessarily have,” Sarcedo-Magruder said.
Pierce currently works with Presto to update its statistics, but since it does not use a website connected with Presto, someone has to enter the data, get updated statistics for players and teams, and update them on the Pierce sports section.
Sarcedo-Magruder said that on the new website with Presto, the statistics and rosters will be updated automatically.
The new Presto website will also benefit recruiting, according to Sarcedo-Magruder. She said that the website will have a recruitment tab where potential student athletes can go to find information on different Pierce sports teams and also input their own information, so that coaches know who is interested in playing and can contact them better.
Sarcedo-Magruder said that the new website with Presto will help promote Pierce College sports and build programs.
“It is really a tool that is going to help us organize and develop the athletic department and stream line some of the processes that we already have in terms of recruiting and getting information out to our current student athletes and potential athletes,” Sarcedo-Magruder said.
Gilbert Salas, athletic secretary at Pierce, said that the new platform will be a lot easier to use, which he believes will attract more athletes to Pierce.
“A lot of interested recruits or athletes, the first thing they look at now a days is the website,” Salas said. “If you have this nice website that attracts the school and makes it easy to sign up, ask questions or get information you tend to be drawn toward it versus something that is a little hard to read or is incomplete. I think it will definitely draw more interest.”
The new website with presto will also help centralize all the resources that are available to student athletes, according to Sarcedo-Magruder. She said it will provide student athletes a place where they can find the resources they need on campus to deal with any issues they may be struggling with.
Tommy Siounit, nursing major, said he thinks that a new sports website should benefit fans, players and coaches.
“Honestly, the more access you have to logistics and statistics, it not only benefits fans that just want to see and keep up, but the actual athletes themselves and the faculty of the athletes, because they want to keep track and see how they can make improvements and what needs work and what doesn’t,” Siounit said.
The website is currently in the developmental phase, which means they are working with Presto, other Pierce departments and coaches to see what they can do to make the best possible website. They are hoping to launch the new website by the end of the Fall 2019 semester, according to Salcedo-Magruder.
