Kentlake High School is a public school in the Kent school district in the State of Washington. It is classified as a 4A school with around 1,400 students, and is located in Kent, Washington.

The current Kentlake Falcon Football website came about out of a need for a quality website that reflected the quality of the football program... the team having made the playoffs the past three seasons, 2009-2011. Prior versions of the website were sufficient but there was a need to "step up our game" in terms of our website's appeal, usability, and functionality. The website is built on Drupal 6.x.

At a glance, a user can easily find our game schedules, rosters, photo galleries, full event calendar, and contact information for booster club members, the head coach, and school principals and staff. Our "Multimedia" section is a big draw as we upload new photo galleries every week, and offer a "Player of the Week" page that features game stats and a video recap from the head coach for each prior week's game. Local sports news outlets now know they can get game stats from this page.

We also swap in content as necessary for short-term spirit wear sales, fundraisers, and the like. We are averaging almost 5,000 visits a month, over 16,000 pageviews a month, and this 2012 football season have absolutely smashed all prior totals for fundraising by a booster club at the school. In a time when public schools are facing budget cuts, the website has absolutely been a boon to the football program. All of the money generated goes back into the football program in an effort to make it one of the premier high school football programs in the State of Washington.

Kentlake High School Football
Why Drupal was chosen: 

The Kentlake High School Football Booster Club selected Drupal for a few reasons:

  • Free open-source CMS solution
  • An active and helpful Drupal community
  • Highly secure
  • Extensible
  • Customizable
  • Thematically flexible
  • High volume of customized modules to choose from
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

Project/website goals/requirements:

  • Increase visibility of the football team
  • Increase fundraising for the football team
  • Create a true "destination" website solely for the football team
  • Be able to keep content fresh
  • Rank well in the search engines
  • Create overall student engagement
  • Create a sense of really being from our local community - that we are an integral part of our local community
  • Create excitement and attract local youth football players, as these kids are our future high school athletes. We want to instill in them a sense of pride about playing football for and attending Kentlake High School

This website is run/administered by a small (6-15) group of parents that form the all-volunteer Booster Club for the Kentlake High School Football team. This requires the website to be technically advanced enough to achieve almost any request on short notice, while remaining easy enough for the average parent to be able to log in and use without overly technical or lengthy instruction. As it is for a High School football team, there will be administrative user turnover year after year as students graduate and their parents move on.

The Kentlake High School Football Booster Club is not directly associated with the school or school district, and is an entirely non-profit group with the sole task of raising money for the football team (for new helmets, uniforms, etc). Secondary goals include; supporting the school coaches and staff, fostering community awareness and involvement, and attracting local athletes. We have also found that our website has created awareness among local news outlets, and creates excitement among the up-and-coming kids involved in the youth football programs in our area... future Kentlake Falcons.

Technical specifications

Key modules/theme/distribution used: 
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

The Theme

Theme: Foundation was chosen for the theme - although it has not been updated in some time, it is a very clean theme if you want to customize your theme. It is not overly complex nor code heavy. It is fairly simple right "out of the box".

A few of the Modules

Boost: The Kentlake Falcon Football website is hosted on Dreamhost, in a shared hosting environment. The Boost module does an unbelievable job in speeding up the page load time in a shared hosting environment. If your website is in a shared hosting environment, I strongly encourage having a look at the Boost module.

Brilliant Gallery and Flickr: We encourage parents to submit photos for our website. Our photo galleries are a huge draw. Flickr, obviously, allows us to import Flickr galleries with up to 500 photos. The Brilliant Gallery allows us to import Google Picasa web galleries. Both of these were chosen as it requires NO image manipulation on the part of the website administrators, we just enter the gallery IDs and all of the images are imported.

Calendar: We HAD TO HAVE a calendar on our website. This is a great help to the entire program as it keeps everyone informed of upcoming dates and events. The calendar events have also been ported into their own "List View" page as well as a list view on the home page of the website.

Video: We use this module on the video gallery on our website, as well as for the Head Coach's Game Recap videos found on our "Player of the Week" page.

Community contributions: 

Although not put back into the Drupal community yet - I DID make a custom module for the Kentlake Falcon Football website as a workaround to a Dreamhost email policy that they created in an attempt to cut down on the amount of spam Dreamhost was processing.

The module download is here http://tentonweb.com/form_overrides.zip

The thread at Dreamhost is here https://discussion.dreamhost.com/thread-135046.html

Our website uses the sitewide Contact Form. Dreamhost instituted a policy that blocks all outgoing mail from @yahoo.com @hotmail.com @gmail.com etc. In order for email from the Contact Form to confidently pass through the Dreamhost filter, the custom module sets the sending domain from the Contact Form as being from an email address on your own domain. The true sending email address is included in the body of the email, and when you hit "Reply" it actually populates the "To" field correctly and responds to the correct email address of the sender. Works great!

Team members: 
Screenshot of Kentlake football video page
Screenshot of the Kentlake Flames - Kentlake High School's Dance Team
Screenshot of the Kentlake Football In the News page.
Sectors: 
Education
Non-profit
Sports