Takkle.com - Social Network for HS Athletes

Want to share your passion for sports? Want to connect with other players? High school athletes have now a site to display their rankings, clips and profiles. Takkle is a new social networking site geared toward those involved in high school sports: players, coaches, and fans. It offers athletes an online space to create player and team profiles, upload video clips and photos, track and view statistics, check out opponents before games, discover the best athletes in the country, and interact with other athletes. It allows high school athletes across the US that participate in sports ranging from tennis to baseball to football to develop personal connections based in their shared interests. In an attempt to connect with young, tech-savvy readers, Sports Illustrated has made an alliance with Takkle, so sports fans can go to Takkle to nominate candidates for SI's Faces in the Crowd, a longstanding department of the magazine that recognizes student athletes. Visitors are also able to submit video highlights of student athletes on Takkle, and SI showcases one athlete's video each week on Takkle.

"TAKKLE is the social network for high school sports. Join today, and you can post photos and videos, share stats and schedules, and a whole lot more with others throughout the TAKKLE community. TAKKLE is a place where students, athletes, coaches, and fans can share their passion for sports."

Takkle is aimed at the high school athletics crowd. It captures teenagers' passion for sports and connecting online with their friends. High school students can use it for MySpace-style social networking, coaches can use it to organize team logistics, and college recruiters can use it to seek out talent. But Takkle also offers advertisers and marketers the ability to target a passionate, engaged audience of high school athletes and fans. The site will probably attract good advertising opportunities as savvy marketers are noe leaving large crowds behind and looking to niche networking sites to ensure they are reaching their target audience.

How Takkle will be able to compete with giant social networking sites?