State Weightlifting Competition

The States were held today at Masuk HS.

Below are the official results of total weight lifted (lbs.).

1. Bridgeport Central, 13,885
2. Ansonia, 12,510
3. Oxford, 11,790
4. Bristol Eastern, 11,725
5. Shelton, 11,485
6. Newtown, 11,370
7. Staples, 11,300
8. Masuk (team 1) 10,860
9. West Haven, 10,630
10. Southington, 10,610
11. Woodland, 10,215
12. NFA, 9,670
13. Notre Dame-West Haven, 9,645
14. Sheehan, 9,625
15. Weston, 9,545
16. Seymour, 9,540
17. East Lyme, 9,300
18. Ridgefield, 8,680
19. Westhill, 8,080
20. Killingly, 6,810
21. Stratford, 6,335
22. Masuk (team 2), 6,185

Coaching News

In addition to the recent vacancy at Wilby with Chris Eckert leaving, we have several NVL jobs open, including those at Wolcott and Crosby.

Former Wolcott coach Pat Russo is certainly a hot commodity, namely for the Crosby job but also potentially for the Wilby position.

Mark Jaffee of the Rep-Am is reporting that the Wolcott Board of Education "will be presented with a recommendation for a new head football coach at its March 28 meeting." We've heard from several folks on here that the frontrunner looks like Jay Pace, but who knows. Looks like we'll find out within the next month.

Emmett O'Brien still does not have an official head coach, but we've been hearing a lot about Kenny Roberts likely taking the job.

Just in this week, former longtime NVL assistant coach Greg Todd has been hired as the head coach at Lewis Mills. I met Todd when he was the freshman coach at Woodland when I was attending school and he's a good man. I wish him the best of luck in trying to steer the young program.

Jaffee's story breaking the Lewis Mills story and furthering info on the Wolcott job can be found here.

As always, feel free to post any information you have on any coaching situations or schedules. Try to keep the rumors under control and harmless.

Wilby Head Coach Resigns

I had heard of reports about the Wilby job being available. Looks like it's finally true. Yes, Chris Eckert has resigned at Wilby.

Wilby is looking for a new head football coach as well as three assistant coaches.

Someone recently posted about it on our Facebook page. And now, the news has hit the CIAC website. Check it out - http://www.casciac.org/scripts/view_message.cgi?86408.

Very interesting, considering Wilby seemed like it was going to improve this season.

And that leaves us with the question ...Who's the front-runner for the job?

2011 Season: Week 1 Games

Some of our bloggers were kind enough to post some of the NVL match-ups for Week 1. Here is what we know so far.

St. Paul at Derby: Since both St. Paul and Derby have out-of-league Thanksgiving Day games, these two squads will likely be playing each other on Week 1 for years to come.
Seymour at EOB Tech: This game may be played at DeBarber Field in Seymour, if EOB cannot secure a home field.

Others:
Crosby vs. Holy Cross
Wolcott vs. Kennedy
Torrington vs. East Lyme
Lyman Hall vs. Wilby
Watertown vs. Montville

We have yet to receive confirmation for Naugatuck, Sacred Heart, Woodland, and Ansonia.

Thanks

I wanted to thank everyone for visiting the blog since its inception last year. It was great to have a place to discuss local high school football without many of the rants, lies, and selfishness of old.

I used to track visits and hits on the old blog. I actually posted some of the statistics once upon a time. Needless to say, THIS blog has out-performed the older blog and we have the results to prove it.

This new NVL Blog was created in late December of 2009. It didn't receive much traffic until the word got out that this was the place to talk local high school football.

To clarify, before you read the stats:
Visits are sessions -- basically, every time someone enters the URL for the blog and the website is displayed. A visit is usually tracked for 20-30 minutes, on average.
Page views are tracked every time a user visits a page on this website. Entering the website, clicking on the comments link, and clicking on any of the tabs near the header will count as page views.
Unique visitor: This counts user to our website only once. The simplest way to explain this is by using the following example. User X visits the blog. This counts as a new unique visitor to the website. User X then visits the blog a week later. This is User X's second visit to the blog, but is identified as just ONE (the same) unique visitor. Therefore, if I visit the blog 100 times a month from home computer, this counts as just ONE unique visitor. Pretty good stat.

From December 2009 through July 2010, the blog received, on average, 100 visits per day.

Once things began to pick up and teams began to practice in August 2010, traffic began to soar. This is when the blog hit its peak. The following are statistics from August 2010 through the end of December 2010.

Aug. 2010 - Dec. 2010
68,978 visits
11,319 unique visitors
148,395 page views
Average time on site: 4 min 40 secs

Things began to simmer down after the state title games in December. Since the end of the 2010 season, we've averaged roughly 100 visits per day through today with 9,859 visits and 1,890 unique visitors.

What is great about this site is that 25% of our traffic comes directly. Meaning people either know the URL or bookmark the website and visit it. 35% of our traffic comes through Google searches for "nvl blog." And another 9% comes via Bing search engine queries. That's close to 70%, which means we don't need to advertise to lure-in visitors.

And finally, here are the total stats from day one:

Total stats (Dec. 2009 through current):
96,629 visits
193,975 page views
14,718 unique visitors
Average time on site: 3 min 58 secs

I am sure the blog will receive a more significant amount of traffic during the 2011 season. These stats prove that not only do our regulars read and post here, but players, parents, and coaches read what we post. As we know, some are more sensitive than others, so think twice about what you're going to post before you hit submit.


Cheers.