Chapter 34

I made it to class about five minutes early. I was heading over to my normal seat when Mr. Douglas said, "Jill, please bring your laptop over here." He was standing next to the podium he usually set his laptop up on when he wanted to demonstrate something to the whole class on the big screen.

I walked over to him and he said, "Go ahead and set up. There's a mouse there if you want it. I'll introduce you and then I'd like you to take over for the rest of the class and explain what you did to put your site together. OK?"

"Sure. I've got my own mouse."

"That's fine. Plug this into your video output."

I got everything set up and verified I had a picture, then put the laptop in standby. I got Mr. Douglas' attention and pointed to a chair next to the podium and he smiled and nodded. I sat down just as he started over toward the podium.

He waited for everyone to settle down, then addressed the class.

"Tonight we're going to do something a little different. As I was coming in from the parking lot tonight, I noticed Miss O'Hara had her laptop set up and was showing something to a friend of hers. It turned out she was showing her something she did for her school volleyball team and is going to use for our final project for this class.

"I was amazed that she'd done so much in a couple of weeks and told her so. That's when I found out that she actually did it in less than a day.

"So, what we're going to do tonight is have Jill show us her project, describing what she did. I'm very curious to learn how you achieved so much in such a short period of time. I'd also like to know why you were in such a hurry if you don't mind."

He moved to the side and waved me to the podium. "Jill?"

I stood up. "Hi. I guess you could say I did it so quick because I didn't have any choice. I'm on our volleyball team and was being a smartass and got benched. This happened Tuesday. We start playoffs on Saturday and I wanted back on the team. So I stopped over at my coach's house after I left here Tuesday night. She told me I needed to do something to pay back the team and I happened to mention I needed to do a web page for this class. She told me that would do it.

"I convinced my boyfriend to take some pictures of the team for me. Then I just thought about what I wanted the site to have on it. I figured we'd have a home page with a picture of the team on it and then thumbnails of the coach and all the players. If you click on a thumbnail, you get to that girl's page. Then one telling about the team, another with the playoff schedule and that was it."

I dug in my bag and pulled out the CD Jack had made for me.

"I talked to Coach and then the team about what we were going to do. My coach got all the information about the playoffs for me and she wrote up some facts about herself for her page. My boyfriend goes to another school so he couldn't get started till his school was over, so everyone had to stay later than normal but they went for it. Here's what happened when he started taking our team picture the way everybody else takes theirs."

I opened up the folder of the first team shots and started clicking through it. After about 10 pictures, I left one on.

"Pretty bad, huh?" A couple of people laughed. "Our coach had the team do some drills that really got them working together the day before when I was on the bench and I'd told Jack about them. He told my coach that he wanted them to do them again. He also talked her into playing with one side and putting me with the other."

I clicked through those shots. "See how we started working together here? On the team shots, it was like sixteen individuals who were in the same place. Now we were a team. We used some of these pictures on the site, too.'

I started showing the new team shots. "He broke off the drill and made us all run over to one side of the court and get together and he started taking pictures of us, telling us we were a team and to show our pride. You can see the difference in these pictures. But he wasn't happy with it. He told us to stay where we were and then he got the volleyball we'd been drilling with and put it on the floor in front of him, then started taking some more pictures. The next thing I knew, he kicked the ball and it came right at me and he took this picture."

I displayed the picture of me catching the ball. "See the a difference? He knew just what to make us do to get the essence of the team come out.

"I want to show you something else, then we'll go to the site." I started going through Roberta's folder. "This is Roberta. She was a junior last year when I started on the team. Our coach last year was the Home Ec teacher." That got a couple of laughs. "I've been playing volleyball for years and I knew most of the girls were just putting in time so they didn't have to do regular PE. I started working with another freshman and pretty soon the two of us were showing everybody up. Roberta gave in and started working with us and she's become a lot better. Anyway, Roberta's always been quiet and nobody knows a lot about her. Jack just started taking pictures of her and got her talking by asking questions. And he got this picture. Pretty good for a girl who keeps to herself, huh?"

I left Roberta's picture on the screen. "I know it sounds like I've been playing cheerleader for my boyfriend's photography. I don't know, maybe I have. I do know that my coach and most of the girls on the team want to pose for him. He was able to find the good pictures where there weren't any before. Roberta likes to sculpt. That picture was taken when she was telling Jack how great it is to look at a piece of stone and see the sculpture that's hidden there waiting to come out, then working with the stone to actually get it. That's what Jack does with his photography. I just got the team to stay a little late, asked some questions so I had something to put on their pages and then put the pieces together. It's sort of the difference in painting a picture and putting a puzzle together."

Mr. Douglas stood up. "Jill, you don't realize what you did. That's like saying an interior decorator just buys a bunch of furniture. You were told to put a web site together. You got an idea of what you wanted people to get from it as well as what you and the team wanted to say on it. You didn't just put the pieces of a puzzle together. You created the puzzle; you designed it. I think it's time to show the class what you did."

"Alright." I got on the web and hit my bookmark for the site. When it came up, I typed in the password. "I've got the site password protected right now until we get permission slips from all the parents. There's nothing adult here but it never hurts to protect yourself."

The home page opened up. "I wanted people to know exactly what this site was about as soon as they got to the home page. Team name in big letters and a picture of the team. As my coach says, this picture looks alive. There's no way you'll be bored watching us play and I wanted to communicate that."

I moved the cursor up top. "You can see I put links to everything up here." I moved over the Player link and the list of names dropped down. "Most people want to be able to navigate the second they think about it. There are a lot of duplicates throughout the site. For example, here," I clicked on Contact and got the same list of names with Web Site Designer and Web Site Photographer at the bottom, "you can email any of the players, the coach or Jack and me. They don't have to know that I'm on the list as a player. I've also got email links on each person's page and there are links for Jack, me and Coach on the About page."

I was still on the home page so I scrolled down to the thumbnails. "Clicking on any of these will take you to that player. The same as clicking on the drop down list I just showed you." I clicked on Annie's picture.

"The thumbnail is full size here next to the player's volleyball information. Anything else they want to say is below along with any pictures they wanted up here. I'm sure most of the girls are going to want to add stuff down the road. Most of them want Jack to take more pictures of them so there will probably be new pictures on most of them."

I hit the back arrow and went back to the home page. "This is another one that Jack took." I scrolled down to the picture of Annie spiking the ball. "This one shows the intensity each of us plays with. You can almost feel the concentration."

"I'd hate to be on the other side of that net," said one of the girls."

"That's the idea. The more scared they are, the easier it is to beat them."

"This is my coach. She was on a championship team in college." I moved to the picture of her on the ground. "Jack caught this one of her when we were doing that drill. She got that ball up high enough for them to handle it. The drill was to hit it to a specific player on the other side and they did it two hits after Coach dug it out of the boards."

"The About page just gives a little history and makes it look like the school decided to hire a real coach out of the goodness of their hearts. It was more like people got interested in the team last year and they pretty much had to. This is another one Jack caught during the drill. I think it really captures the joy and the closeness we feel when we play really well together. That's something our coach was able to bring out and is why we're going all the way in the playoffs this year."