(i) Mapping out a Better Plan

As an active soccer coach, I am very conscious that every year, youth and high school sports events across the country are too often either disrupted, called off or postponed due to severe weather warnings. Worse, some athletes suffer serious injury, even death from severe weather on the sports field, resulting from killer conditions such as, lightning strikes, tornadoes, and high heat indexes where warnings either come too late , or never come at all. Here are just a few examples of how weather conditions can present extreme danger for high school athletes: - In March 2007, eight teenagers died when a tornado struck Enterprise High School in Alabama, blowing out the walls and collapsing part of the roof. - According to the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, there are 1,112 public schools in Arkansas. Only 72 of those have a designated emergency shelter for severe weather. - Five young athletes, from 11 to 17 years old, died of heat stroke in 2006. - During the past 10 years, 23 people were killed and 45 injured by lightning - mostly students -- at or near a school facility, according to the non-profit organization "Struck by Lightning." Luckily, high schools no longer need to be totally at the mercy of weather and weather forecasts. Help is on the way through a brand new weather technology designed for high school sports. It's called iMapâ„¢ and it is coming to you soon via the interactive pages of High School Sports The Magazine. The program, which works on Google Maps, was designed by Weather Decision Technologies (WDT) and is the first weather service dedicated to high school weather safety. Yes, there are plenty of web-based weather data sources out there. Most websites get their primary weather information from the National Weather Service (NWS). What's different is that the iMap weather alert system produces real-time granular and site-specific weather alerts. This is how iMap works: . You enter your specific address (rather than a zip code or county warning areas) and iMap determines the exact latitude and longitude of that address. Then, iMap alerts you using the latest NWS "VTech" watches and warnings which narrow the warnings to a much smaller area you care about. This minimizes false warnings, yet alerts you when hazardous weather is imminent at your location. iMap also provides you with your own proprietary lightning detection and prediction capability which provides lightning alerts before lightning is a threat. The alerts give you both estimated time of arrival and estimated time of departure information so you can plan accordingly. WDT is delighted to be working with High School Sports Magazine to promote the development and execution of iMap as the United States' first comprehensive school weather alerting service for each school in the entire United States. What does this mean for high schools? It means that school leaders (principals, athletic coaches and staff, for example) can now be personally alerted via the iMap system when lightning strikes or other severe weather patterns are detected or predicted to impact one of their facilities or locations. What does this mean for student athletes?? It means you can also access iMap using an intuitive interactive Google Map interface that allows you to move the location for alerting and choose between alerting options and receive the same alerts your school administration is getting. iMap is available on the High School Sports Magazine website right now - try it out for yourself on www.hsstm.com. It will offer the following watches and warningswatches and warnings for : Lightninglightning, tornadoes, thunderstorms, flash floods, fog, freeze, wind, extreme heat, winter weather and more. - Tornado - Severe thunderstorm - Flash Flood - Dense Fog - Freeze - High Wind - Winter Weather - Tropical storm - Hurricane - Wind chill - Excessive Heat Mother Nature will keep on reminding us that we will always be vulnerable to rapid weather changes at our school sports events, but we no longer need to be at the mercy of poor or broad-based county warnings when better and much more precise warnings are now available through iMap. These narrower warnings allow us to make critical sports event decisions that keep our children safe, yet maximize our ability to still go ahead with practices and games when it is safe to do so. Please look out for future updates in High School The Sports Magazine about this exciting new service!.