When Don and I decided to tackle the SCORE OS project, our original timeline had us converting the old Pre Pro Hoops South (college basketball) code into what would be the first release of SCORE OS. However, as holidays, real work, and life plans (engagements, physical injuries, and family issues) crept into the picture, we realized that the fantasy college basketball season was passing too quickly.

With fantasy baseball already being well-established on the main sites and much less of a need for new systems in that segment, Don and I decided to go after a much different beast: Fantasy Soccer (or Internation Football for you sticklers). Even further, we decided to tackle the Major League Soccer area because it's local, I live in an MLS town (Chicago Fire), and we'd rather not have to deal with international issues just quite yet (re: EPL). Now, this is going to be a challenge, somewhat, since neither Don nor I know much about International Football and definitely not much about the players on the teams involved. However, I remember not knowing much about college football players outside of the Georgia Bulldogs and fantasy college football now has me fairly knowledgable about players on Mountain West teams (for crissake!).

Thus, Don and I set forth on some research. One of the things I noticed right off the bat was how the MLS folks don't understand fantasy sports in a way that can truly benefit them. For instance, there is a Fantasy MLS game on FoxSports.com (that is also hosted at MLSNET.com) and it has a few flaws:

• No leagues
• No exclusive rights to players (folks can draft identical rosters)
• Non-custom scoring
• No head-to-head schedules

There's nothing wrong with ths Fox/MLS fantasy game of course, but they are missing out on what makes Fantasy NFL and Fantasy MLB so good: socialization mechanisms, exclusive ownership of players, and competition between rivals. People like fantasy sports because they get to mimic the ownership of a team and compete among friends. In the case of Fox/MLS, I'm competiting against a million other folks who might pick the same players...and I have no way to brag about winning. Basically, this is the type of game that starts out with a million people and dies off to a few remaining die-hards at the very end. Essentially, the goals of a fantasy system of a Real Sports League is to generate fan interest, promote their athletes, and keep fans craving more day-to-day information about the sport. The current Fox/MLS system probably only reaches about 50% of this goal.

So our goals aim for the next 50%. We want to establish a Fantasy Soccer system that allows for Head-to-Head, exclusive roster play just like the NFL and MLB leagues typically do. Along the way, we'll learn about the MLS players (and soccer in general) and be able to grease our development while playing and running the system, which makes development 10X easier, frankly.

So, our first challenge is to round up ten guys to form a league, hold a draft, establish a scoring system, and get the code from PPHS working for MLS. We're almost there for the first week of the MLS games (this weekend on March 29). We'll keep you posted on where this goes...Thus far, we have a prototype site that folks can browse: Pre Pro MLS