Throughout high school, D.L. Wallace was a star athlete. The teenager known as “Dynamite” to his peers played football and baseball and ran track. But without attention from scouts or media outfits, his athletic career fizzled out early in college.
“Maybe if someone would have seen me,” he says, “I would have gotten a scholarship.”
Last year, Wallace just so happened to be looking for a new project. After founding the DFW Business Training Center, a successful employment-training facility, he was able to retire at the age of 32. But Wallace soon grew restless—and outnumbered at home by his wife and six daughters—and saw an opportunity with the online social network boom to create a community where amateur athletes, fans, and coaches could come together.
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About 1 in 17 of all high school senior boys playing interscholastic football will go on to play at an NCAA member institution.
Less than 1 in 35 Source: NCAA.org |
“We didn’t just want a social network for people to just log on and chat. We wanted a network with some functionality,” Wallace says.
He created MySportsGroove.com, a Web site that launched in March, which not only allows its users to interact with athletes across the country, but also acts as an online sports agent for athletes ages 13 through 19.
“MySportsGroove is the first social network where people can upload their stats online, send their info to colleges nationwide, and actually make an aggressive effort to promote themselves for the sake of getting a college scholarship or just getting recognized,” Wallace says.
The site features daily scholar athletes, top videos of the day, SAT prep questions, recruiting tips, and sports trivia. Wallace hopes that athletes will be given the chance for exposure that he never received. “I’m looking forward to the day when I log on and see somebody’s smiling face who got a college scholarship because of [our work],” he says.
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| illustration by Chip Wass |
