UHND in Sports Illustrated
Frank Vitovitch
October 22, 1999

I have subscribed to Sports Illustrated for a good five years now and every week I usually take the magazine, open up like 20 pages into it, and then read what ever articles interest me and I always read Inside College Football, NFL, and Major League Baseball.  I always skipped over the first 20 or so pages I thought it was just ads and stuff - after today I plan on reading them all now.

If it had not been for a friend of my family faxing the page to us  I probably would have never noticed what was on page 26.  What was so special about page 26?  Well at first glance I saw a picture of Bob Davie leading the team onto the field so I figured it was just an article on the team.  After a second I noticed something else though.  I nearly collapsed when I saw the line the article that read "http://www.uhnd.com."

It turns out that Sports Illustrated has a section every week on Multimedia related information.  This week's is called the surfer and it gave links to Notre Dame pages on the Internet.  Along with a link to UHND, Sports Illustrated had NBC's Notre Dame Central, and Mike's ND Links.  Congrats Mike, your page is one of the oldest on the net and you truly deserve this recognition since you link to just about everything.  They also had a three other sites that were not directly related to Notre Dame.

If someone would have told me at this time last year I would have a web site that gets listed in a magazine like Sports Illustrated, I would have told them they were crazy.  I was working a little Notre Dame page on xoom that had no original articles, no recruiting information, no active message board, little traffic, and a non user-friendly design.  A lot has changed since then though, and I must admit I never saw myself having a site grow so much and so fast after my original page, then called "The Golden Dome."

I would like to thank a few people.  First, Mike Frank.  During recruiting season last year Mike allowed me to use some of his info in return for a link back to his site.  Allowing me to do this gave my site a recruiting section which I learned was a must for a Notre Dame site to move into the upper tier.   If you have never seen his site, its at http://www.irishreport.rivals.com , and go check it out.  Chris Pool of the Pigskin Recruiting Journal (http://pigskinrecruiting.rivals.com) helped me out in this way too.  

Secondly Duane Rossiter.  Like Mike, he helped me with recruiting information and helped give my site out to people.  Glenn Donovan, who now works on the Irish Recruiting Journal, also helped me out.  We worked on the Golden Dome together for a while until the summer. 

I would also like to thank everyone who visited the page back when I wasn't part of UHND and now that I am.  You guys allow me and Kyle to do all this by visiting the page.  We both would like to thank you all who have faithfully visited our sites (site) since they were new, unorganized, and growing web sites.

I am sure Kyle would like to thank a few people too, but he is still on retreat and won't be back till Friday night so he doesn't even know we are in the issue yet.  I do know however he would definitely thank Allen Wallace for providing him and now us with recruiting information.

Well that's it.  Sorry if I got a little "sappy", but I was and still am thrilled to death that we got in Sports Illustrated.  I remember when I was really little and looked through SI's thinking I would be in some day, well I am - just in a totally different way than I thought I would be.

Visit Sports Illustrated on the web at www.cnnsi.com, and if you don't get it - subscribe to it - its well worth the money (and they always give away the coolest gifts!)