Empty the Bench

While we find amazing work, articles, rants, musings, etc just about everyday from our fellow sportswriting brethren, Empty the Bench would like to take a moment to highlight two brand-spankin’ new items you need to check out.

Erin and Jason Gurney, the whiz-bang tech geniuses behind lowpost.net, striketwo.net, and faircatch.net, have just launched their latest and possibly greatest site this week, and it comes with the official ETB Stamp of Approval. Ballhype is a little hard to describe because, well, there aren’t any sports sites like it. At its core, Ballhype is a community-driven gathering place for writers and fans to “hype up” the best stories, games, etc on the Web. The Gurneys cite Facebook, Digg, and Techmeme as major influences for the site’s social networking, user-generated news, and group components. Here’s a little bit more from the founders themselves:

Ballhype tracks more than 1,600 sports blogs to find great content so you don’t have to. Hype up the best stories, submit new links, or write your own posts, and let the fans decide. We think that being a fan should be fun. You can hang out on Ballhype without submitting content or voting — lurk, even — but we get more out of watching the Warriors lose if there’s even one other fan in the room. So Hype it up, add Friends, leave Sticky Notes, make Game Picks, create or join Groups. You should get your friends to join Ballhype, if only to have bragging rights over your pick ranking.

It’s a great idea, a great site, and is well worth joining and bookmarking.

Another bookmark-worthy site is Hoops Addict, where over the past two weeks Ryan McNeill has scored two interviews with authors of basketball-related books; both are available to stream as podcasts. First, McNeill chatted up Brian McCormick about his book “Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development;” click here to give it a listen. This diehard Raptors fan also tracked down Christopher Bibey to talk about his book, “Open Your Heart With Basketball: Mastering Life through Love of the Game,” which details Bibey’s life after being diagnosed with cancer during his freshman season in college. Listen to the interview.