portfolio  |
I started E-Lacrosse in late 1996. There were no sports sites at the time and many people were still skeptical of the web in general. Web advertising was not an industry yet. E-Lacrosse was one of the first "E-Zines". We featured news stories, commentary, video and links to the lacrosse team web sites that were popping up. A who's who of lacrosse section became extremely popular as a registry for coaches and players to connect socially or to schedule out of town games. Our StickTech section which teaches kids how to tweak their equipment achieved cult status with the kids who string sticks. These kids are usually the team leaders and our popularity grew because of their devotion to our content.     E-Lacrosse 1997 to present Many of the lacrosse advertisers had no banner ads or web savvy, so we had to produce the ads for them in order to get their business. A creative shop was born. With only a little help on very complicated graphics and programming, I produced ads for most of our advertisers from concept to delivery.      Some E-Lacrosse Client ads E-Lacrosse's video section was so popular that I began producing video commercials to be inserted into our programming. The work was so creative that even Toyota asked us to create a few commercials for them. The Toyota ads were so good that I was requested to make a full resolution copy on DVD for the CEO to view. The music in our ads was from bands which included lacrosse players that I found through some networking within the sport. Many of these video spots can be seen in this montage. 
STX, the biggest lacrosse manufacturer, was our first advertiser. Over the years I did many creative ad campaigns for them. Early on, the relationship with STX was so good and they liked the E-Lacrosse site so much that they asked me to create their STX Putters website as they were just entering the golf market. I created that one and the next iteration with very creative catalog style layout before anyone sold anything on the net. I produced a couple of STX video ads that were very popular, many wallpapers, banner ads, and full campaigns for the web. LaxWorld, the largest retailer in lacrosse, began to manufacture a helmet called PlayLax PLH 2000. This was in the year 2000. This was also the year of the World Games of Lacrosse, being held in Baltimore, Maryland. They asked for help with marketing the helmet on our site and in magazines. We took the helmet and hired a custom motorcycle artist to paint it like an NHL Goalie helmet using a patriotic theme and a masterpiece was created. After exhibiting it at the World Games with a big company presence as the official vendor, it became the imagery used in their online and print campaigns for a year. deBeer, another lacrosse manufacturer, asked for help making video ads capturing the spirit of lacrosse. I designed a whole campaign, "Lacrosse is Life" and created all of the collateral and wrote all of the video copy. Another retailer, Olympic Den, with multiple locations in New York, asked for my help producing a campaign for them in the spring of 2007. Valentine's day was more than a month away so I suggested the love theme and they liked it. The ads were so effective that we did it again at Christmas time.  
 Olympic Den ads from the holidays 1Lacrosse, a new manufacturer of equipment in 2008, advertised with E-Lacrosse but had no collateral. I produced a few campaigns for them including Wallpaper giveaways, magazine ads, and video ads. Smartlink, a staffing company that has great ties to the lacrosse community asked us to produce banner ads and video ads for them in 2007. I produced 11 commercials based on interviews with lacrosse playing employees. Scorpion, a manufacturer of lacrosse shafts, needed banner ads and wallpapers for their ad campaign on E-Lacrosse and other web sites in 2006. I produced their collateral for three years.    Ads for 1Lacrosse, Smartlink and Scorpion In 1996, I created a phony product called the Butthead, an expensive end cap for the lacrosse stick and created the Butthead company ads as a spoof and ran them on E-Lacrosse for six months.  I can still ask kids if they've heard of the butthead company and most have. Some even say they loved the product, but we had no product. Much of the advertising materials that I have produced were for E-Lacrosse itself. From tournament posters to magazine ads, I handled the external marketing. I designed the site itself and created it with self taught code and original graphics. As kids were starting their own team websites in 2000 we started the "steal our gifs" program where we basically told the kids they could steal any image, background or video they wanted and use them for free. There are still many of our backgrounds out there on sites for lacrosse all over the world.     E-Lacrosse ads E-Lacrosse hosted quite a few tournaments in the US and all over the world. Two of our most exciting events were the Amsterdam and London Tournaments. I produced the logos, posters, invitations, site badges and every other article of collateral for these successful events.     Tournament posters I teamed with two different artists to create lacrosse based comic strips for the site. The first was Carole Miller, a Baltimore art teacher and lacrosse parent. The strip was called CrosseTown and ran for two years. The second was called Jerry King on Lacrosse. Jerry is a well-known professional cartoonist. I wrote the copy and they would draw the comics.   E-Lacrosse cartoons When the site began, it was very graphical. It was likened to a NASCAR car with graphic logos and messages covering it. Every story had a cover graphic. I produced every one of them and there were thousands over the years.       Some E-Lacrosse Cover graphics Over twelve years I have created hundreds of E-Lacrosse wallpapers. We gave them away in a Free Stuff area of the site, along with those of our sponsors, most of which we created.     E-Lacrosse wallpapers The site has seen many iterations over 12 years and I designed all but the last. The site was written up by the Baltimore Sun a few times and the Washington Post early on. Since then, USA Today, a few TV stations and a few other papers have reviewed the site favorably. We received rave reviews from Yahoo when they used to review sites and still hold the top spot in overall lacrosse searches due to the abundance of related content. In the twelve years of E-Lacrosse's existence I have written over a thousand opinion pieces, 500 articles and edited thousands more. For two years I also wrote the lacrosse blog for the Baltimore Sun. Some creative samples of that work is below. Humorous commentary: A spoof equipment review The perfect team review A musical mea culpa Men, on women's lacrosse Take the Lacrosse Counter Culture Quiz Serious commentary: The E-Laxerata Does ESPNU own the game of lacrosse? BOOOYAAH! What's Killing Lacrosse's Retailers? An index of mostly editorials I wrote for the Baltimore Sun. Features page at E-Lacrosse - I edited those which I did not write. |