Article about Michelle & her old site: The (slow & mostly painful) death of ihigh.com
Posted by Michelle on Oct 5, 2006 in Michelle
My dear friend Bryan is a sports editor at the newspaper in Kinston. He writes a blog on the paper and a recent one entitled the The (slow & mostly painful) death of ihigh.com was about me and the company I used to work for before quitting to work for myself and parent Hayley.
I adore Bryan and regular readers might know him from several years of beach trip photos/stories and basketball tournament photos. I’ve known him since the days when I ran nchometeam.com.
There were some really nice comments on his blog too about the site, which really made me happy as well. My work there was something I was deeply passionate about for many years but leaving it was for the best in so many ways.
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The (slow & mostly painful) death of ihigh.com
By Bryan C. Hanks
A few years ago, a good friend of mine — Michelle Donahue Hillison from Raleigh – started the northcarolina.ihigh.com site in our state. For several years, it was THE site to go to when you wanted to know what was going on statewide in prep sports. Every school was represented on the site with scores, schedules, news, etc., by local sports writers and writers from within each individual school.
Most of that — heck, all of that — was due to the hard work Michelle put into the site. I know for a fact that she worked sometimes 18-20 hours a day to make ihigh.com the premier prep sports site in N.C.
For a time, the ihigh folks supported her, too. She was able to hire writers from all over the state (myself, Chris Hobbs from Hickory, Langston Wertz from Charlotte, Charles Alston from Rocky Mount, among many others) to write for her.
When the Internet explosion started to die down a couple of years ago, the money dried up, too. She was unable to keep the writers and the site started to die.
But she kept working hard and procured agreements from newspapers all over the state to use their stories on the site. That worked for a while.
She finally decided she was ready to go in a different direction and now runs her own sports consulting business in the Triangle that is – by the way – going strong. But ihigh has continued to plug along, sometimes painfully.
Well, sound the death bells for ihigh.com. Today, the site has moved along to more of a teeny-bopper “entertainment-type” site that pretty much forgets sports altogether.
You know what? Good riddance. Arnold Solomon’s ncpreps.com took over the mantle as best prep site in N.C. after Michelle left ihigh and it is the place you have to go if you want to know what other fans and coaches are thinking throughout North Carolina.
The powers-that-be at ihigh.com should be ashamed of the way they ruined a great Web site.
Forget them. Support ncpreps.com
Bryan’s Blog on the Kinston Free Press website.
