SportsManias: Custom Sports News about Your Favorite Teams!

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Imagine finding all of the sports news about your favorite teams in one place. No more searching Twitter, Google, newspapers or other websites for information, you could see it on one screen as it’s posted. While that idea may seem too good to be true, that service actually exists, for free, from SportsManias.

Whether you’re excited about the upcoming NCAA Basketball Tournament, Major League Baseball season or other sporting events, you should check out SportsManias.  If you’re a fan of sports and want news, scores, tweets, videos, schedules and other information on your favorite teams, then you’ll be a fan of SportsManias.

With SportsManias you can follow your favorite college and pro sports teams from:

• NFL
• NBA
• MLB
• NHL Hockey
• NCAA football/basketball
• Soccer, including MLS, Premier League, BBVA, Mexican and Serie A

SportsManias consolidates sports information to give you what you need to know to follow your favorite teams. You can use SportsManias both as a website and on its iPhone/iPad and Android apps, allowing you to follow along with a game, whether you’re in the stands or watching it on TV.

I recently had a chance to chat with the founders of SportsManias, Aymara Del Aguila and Vicente Fernandez, a mother and son team who created SportsManias to help sports fans find information about their favorite teams. Del Aguila’s background in marketing and Fernandez’s background in sports and journalism blended well to create and refine SportsManias. “We’re categorizing and curating news in a way that’s relevant to fans,” explained Fernandez.

About SportsManias

SportsManias is a service for sports fans to learn information about their favorite teams in one place. The service offers a digital platform that connects sports fans with news, scores, tweets, schedules, standings, videos and more. SportsManias aggregates content from local newspapers and Twitter to gather information about sports teams.

“SportsManias brings together every local beat writer in this country who covers professional and collegiate teams and feeds die-hard sports fans every tweet, every article, and the scores, schedules and standings for their team. Our entire content is professional,” said Del Aguila.

The website started in October 2012, followed by apps in early 2013. A redesigned website was launched in December with a cleaner design. “We felt it was a good idea to go with a redesigned website to go with a cleaner, simpler user interface that has paid off. We’ve been able to introduce new features such as a head-to-head page,” said Fernandez.

SportsManias is also helping local newspapers by sending visitors to them. Article headlines are listed and readers click through to the newspapers’ websites to read the articles. Fans who might not otherwise visit those websites can see articles from local newspapers who cover their favorite teams. SportsManias has begun collaborating with local newspapers by giving exposure to their articles and to their writers on Twitter.

Using SportsManias

Using SportsManias is easy, just go to SportsManias.com or download the app (links below) and either 1) sign in with Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus or 2) create an account using your email address. Pick your favorite teams and then see the news on each one.

Twitter

If you’ve ever been frustrated in trying to find information on Twitter, you’ll appreciate how SportsManias delivers relevant tweets for you. SportsManias makes Twitter easier to use and goes beyond finding tweets with certain hashtags.

Del Aguila pointed out that Twitter can be difficult to navigate for many people and using SportsManias gives you the content from Twitter that you want to see without having to bother with knowing the keywords to search, people to follow or hashtags to use. You don’t even need a Twitter account to see tweets using SportsManias. “It eliminates the time and the search factors,” said Del Aguila.

Your SportsManias feed will include tweets from relevant Twitter users who tweet about the teams so it finds information you might miss if you were just doing a Twitter search. Fernandez explained that even die-hard sports fans are missing out on team news because they don’t have access to local newspapers, they aren’t on Twitter or they aren’t finding relevant results in their searches.

“We do a lot more than other aggregators. We don’t just aggregate based on keywords or hashtags. We hand-select sources for each team that we feel are feeding the best content on those teams, whether it’s local beat writers, the teams themselves, popular blogs or the top athletes for the teams,” said Fernandez.

Head-to-Head

SportsManias also recently started a Head-to-Head section that shows you the Twitter feeds for your team and the opposing team side-by-side during the game so you can see what is being said about the competition. No need for you to follow the opposing team on Twitter or search for them to see their tweets in real time during the game.

Rumors

One particularly unique feature of SportsManias is the Rumors section that gives you the unsubstantiated, off-the-record information about your teams. If you don’t care about rumors, you can avoid this section. But if you’re curious about rumors you can read about them without fear of being fooled into thinking that the stories are verified news stories.

This is one of the many areas where Fernandez’s journalism background comes into play.”The Rumors section is actually something I was always interested in,” he said. He recognizes the difference between sourced stories and rumors and has empowered SportsManias to be able to distinguish between the two.

Second Screen

Fans can also use SportsManias to get breaking news during a game.  As a sports fan, Fernandez knows the information that sports fans look for during a game, but he used to encounter challenges when searching for the real-time news he wanted. He realized that if he wanted news about a team that wasn’t doing well or was far away from his location, the information was more difficult to gather.

“If a fan wants a second screen experience or can’t keep up with the game, they can follow it on SportsManias and it’s as if they’re listening to it on the radio almost,” said Fernandez. “You have much more than a box score coming in, you have tweets and content that is catered to these fans. It’s a great resource for die-hard fans during game time.”

International Sports

SportsManias covers sports around the world. “From the beginning we knew that one of the benefits we could give was to cover more than just American sports, we could cover international soccer, we could cover rugby,” said Fernandez. They started off by covering international soccer (football) leagues from many different countries and hope to expand to rugby some day.

Del Aguila and Fernandez even chose the name SportsManias with a view to international sports coverage. Del Aguila pointed out that “Manias” is also a Spanish word and has a Latin root so that people from around the world can understand the site is about passion.

Apps

In addition to sports news being available free on their website, SportsManias is also available via free apps for:

iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch

Android

SportsManias is totally free. There are no in-app purchases available and Del Aguila promised that the content will always be free on SportsManias.

Your Thoughts

Are you excited about getting information about your favorite sports team from SportsManias? Do you like the idea of following news and tweets about your favorite teams? Do you like how SportsManias makes Twitter easier to use? Let us know in the Comments section below!