Scout.com Partnerswith U.S. Army Bowl

Scout.com will sponsor the U.S. Army All-American Bowl, a Jan. 15 game in San Antonio, broadcast on NBC and featuring the top senior high-school football players in the nation.

SEATTLE, October 11, 2004 – Exclusive access and coverage of the nation’s top high-school football prospects will be major benefits of Scout.com’s sponsorship of the prestigious U.S. Army All-American Bowl. The game is played in San Antonio, Tex., at the Alamodome on Jan. 15, 2005, and broadcast nationally on NBC.

Scout.com also is the exclusive selection partner for the game, an associated national combine and the high-school version of the Heisman Trophy under the sponsorship, which was announced today and extends through 2013.

The sponsorship includes signage, in-game TV media, brand recognition and participation in all the events leading up to the game. National Recruiting Analysts Tom Lemming, Jamie Newberg and Allen Wallace (SuperPrep) will leverage Scout.com’s entire team of nationwide scouts to assist in the selection process for the Bowl, for which Scout.com also is the exclusive online sports network partner.

Scout.com experts will lead the selection process for The Ball Park National Player of Year, awarded to the nation’s top prep football player during Bowl week. Past winners include Oklahoma running back Adrian Peterson and Florida quarterback Chris Leak.The multi-year contract also will enable Scout.com to offer exclusive video and interviews.

Recruiting fans also will be excited to learn that during Bowl week, Scout.com experts will have exclusive coverage of the U.S. Army National Combine Presented by Reebok, a premier prep event, which invites the nation’s top 400 underclassmen to San Antonio. Scout.com experts will be the official selection partners for the Combine and fans will get the earliest look possible at the nation’s top underclassmen. Scout.com will be providing exclusive video, highlights and interviews of the players that will be unavailable on any other sports online network.

Scout.com is the new name for the Web’s largest independent sports network, known until today as TheInsiders.com, which provides sports fans of all interests with a one-stop destination for detailed sports information, analysis, in-depth features and interactivity.

Ball Park Player of the Year
Adrian Peterson commits
to Oklahoma during the
2003 All-American Bowl

"Our network has dominated the college football recruiting industry since our team invented the nation-wide recruiting database in 1998," Scout CEO Jim Heckman said. "The database is the central tool for our Scout network in providing customers instant information on their team’s top prospects. We’ve turned college football recruiting from a cult following served by ‘one-man hobbyists’, to a significant year-long, mainstream news category. It’s not an exaggeration to say we’ve revolutionized media coverage of college football and basketball recruiting. Today we’re a one-stop sports information network, and we’re very excited to help celebrate our name change by being involved in what is being called ‘The Super Bowl of High School Football’."

Jamie Newberg, Scout.com’s National Recruiting Analyst, said, "Our association with the U.S. Army All-American Bowl and the Combine is huge. We will have exclusive access to the top prospects, not only for this year, but for future years, taking our evaluation and coverage of recruiting to a whole, other level. For us as evaluators and analysts, this is a great opportunity and should be an exciting development for our fans. We are going to be all over this."

Heckman additionally points to recent success that the Scout.com brand name will be able to build upon. September’s Nielson Net Ratings report confirms that TheInsiders.com (now Scout.com) had more than 1.75 million unique monthly visitors, which is 1 million more than the competition. Heckman, who founded TheInsiders in June 2001 and also founded the original Rivals network in 1998, decided that Scout.com reflected the unique “first-person perspective” for the network of 175 online publishers who cover sports, including college football and basketball, NFL and MLB. The network is especially well-known for accurate and timely college football and basketball recruiting information. Scout.com also is the largest team sports print publisher in the nation with 38 team-specific magazines.

"Scout.com is simple, bold and describes exactly what we do as an online sports network," Heckman said. "We looked at why a ‘scout’ is used: to produce specific, often difficult-to-acquire information through observation and analysis. Our company has a virtual army of Scouts across the nation focused solely on obtaining, documenting and analyzing proprietary sports information that is unique to our business."

About Scout.com
Scout.com is the No. 1 independent sports network on the Internet. Scout has more than 1.77 million audited monthly unique users (Nielsen Net Ratings) and reaches more than 38 million users each month through syndication agreements with FOXSports.com, SportsIllustrated.com, SportsLine.com and Yahoo! Sports. Scout syndicates more than 1,000 pieces of content daily to these syndication partners, has secured more than 150,000 current, paid subscribers and publishes, via Scout Publishing, 38 college, NFL and MLB glossy team magazines. Scout.com and Scout Publishing are wholly owned and operated by Seattle-based, Scout.com, Inc.