HOME Official Web Site Current Roster Transactions Standings Stats
Glads TV
Photo Gallery About Admin
 
Our Mission
  • To promote ECHL and Gwinnett Gladiators professional hockey world wide.
  • To help provide a player-parent-family connection via multimedia materials.
  • A resource to the great fans of Gwinnett Gladiators professional hockey.
  • Promote the GREATEST game on earth here in Atlanta.
  • To be unlike any other unofficial fan-based hockey site.
  • Who We Are
    This site is built and maintained by Steve and Sandy Hampton of Alpharetta, GA. Sandy shoots the video while Steve shoots the stills and edits the footage down to video clips. Steve is a successful software developer in the North Atlanta area and lends his skills to this project as a hobby.

    We hope what we have built is unlike anything you've seen before from any other unofficial fan-based hockey web site.

    We are visited by players, fans, player agents, scouts and members of the ECHL and Gladiators organizations. We are also viewed internationally in Canada, Europe, Eurasia, Japan, and South Korea, just to name a few. We hope you all continue to enjoy the level of quality we provide as the response has been great over the seasons.

    Our Staff
    All content (video clips, photos, news gathering, and software development) is authored and maintained by Steve Hampton.

    Local Hockey Community
    We also tape local hockey games ranging from GSHL High School to ACHA Division II College Hockey as well as AAHL Adult Hockey! While Sandy films the Gladiators hockey games, Steve films all of the community activities. We have recently secrured permission to film and post Kennesaw State University (KSU) Fighting Owls hockey games for the 2010-11 season. We hope that in some small way the clips we provide in our Community section helps promote and grow ice hockey in the Atalnta metro area or at least helps promote local talent. We have fun taping the games and we hope you enjoy watching some of the best local hockey talent in our vast metro area.

    This is another innovation that most other fan sites don't offer. ...And why would they? It takes a tremendous amount of time, effort, and commitment in addition to the main focus of the site. We hope this effort is another attribute that makes us unique from any other unofficial fan forum.

    You never know who's going to be skating in the adult leagues... Some former professional and collegiate hockey players who've settled in the metro area can be seen in a few of our high-level adult hockey events.

    The GSHL (Georgia Student Hockey League) games are a great resource for parents and family members alike to capture and relive those great hockey moments! Our extensive video database is searchable by player last name enabling you to quickly locate clips.

    Funding and Development
    We pay for and personally write every line of application software code that you see on this site. We will neither take nor will we accept any donations toward this effort. We make no money, receive no special compensation, and will not accept one penny for payment for any special work we may do for the team or its family members. The money we spend in maintaining this site and it's materials is a drop in the bucket compared to the joy we get out of a season of Gwinnett Gladiator hockey.

    How We Got Started
    We literally became Gladiator fans our first game. We didn't know jack about hockey and a friend of Steve's at work named Pete Macko stated that, if we were looking for something to do, we should check out a Gwinnett Gladiators hockey game. Naturally, we responded with: What? Gwinnett has a professional hockey team?? Actually, and no offense intended, but at the time, we didn't think Gwinnett had a "pro" anything, other than a pro-growth stance impacting the population density over there. So, around Thanksgiving of the 2006-07 season, the family hopped in to the car and headed to Gwinnett. Pete had no idea he'd created two new hockey monsters with such an innocent suggestion, but he sure knows it now!

    We had no idea that a single indoor sport could be so exciting! First impressions are forever. We were just impressed with the building (The Arena at Gwinnett Center). But it was not without notice that we detected the superb way inwhich the game was presented (by PA and Director of Marketing, Chris Peace), the professionalism and courtesy by everyone at the Arena from show pros, event staff, the wait staff, and really, just everyone!

    From that first game, we immediately became walk-up ticket holders for the rest of the season, only missing a few games. It seems like forever-ago to us but also just like yesterday.

    Our story is not unique and it happens many times per season as people discover that there is a really good pro hockey team playing in a spectacular building in Duluth, Gwinnett County, GA.

    We loved it so much and were so shocked that a great thing like this was going on under a lot of people's noses, that we decided to take matters into our own hands and to do whatever we can in promoting this great diamond in the rough.

    We built this site as a way to communicate the awesome experience we continue having to this very day. We wanted to create something tangable that people could put their ears and eyes on in hopes of driving them to purchase tickets and get the "Hockey bug!"

    This site was launched in February 2007, a few months after we saw our first ever live hockey game. That's how much of an impression this thing of ours (Gwinnett Gladiators hockey) has inspired us to do what we've done.

    We didn't start out with a mission to bridge a gap between players and their families. Nope, that didn't come until we met some of the players and their families. Fans have unprecidented access to minor leaguers, so, it wasn't too hard to actually get to know some of the boys. From that experience, we said, you know, we ought to tweak our mission a bit to help the parents keep up with their budding pro athlete(s) with the resources we have. We had all of the tools we needed, really, since our daughter is an athlete, we record every pitch she throws -- why not film Glads games and put the highlights out there? What a fantastic way for the families of the players to keep up with their ascending pro stars than publishing video clips of their kid doing what they helped foster over an entire childhood. It's a win all the way around as the families, fans, players, the organization and the league (ECHL) benefit from the popularity and availability of such resources. We also take loads of pictures so that friends and family alike can enjoy watching "scotty" grow into a mature young man.

    The Gwinnett Gladiators as an organization is widely regarded as one of the top five super ships of the ECHL. That is no coincidence as the organization, from top to bottom, left to right, is superb with honor and respect throughout the league. Having a winning team certainly helps but if you don't have ownership, management, and staff who understand what it takes to win, it would not sustain itself with the consistency we've enjoyed season-after-season.

    Multimedia Turnaround Time
    As you might well imagine, we only have access to, at most, prosumer equipment. This means that we can't just turn things around as soon as a home game is finished. We don't make all of the games but we make most of them.

    Typically, it can take us up to 6-8 hours to process the photos and the video from a single game. Weeknight games can take a couple of days since we do have day jobs.

    Once a home game is finished we go home and start work. Sandy reviews the tape and lays out the video markers while Steve starts the process of reviwing photos. There can be anywhere from 200-450 photos taken per game, so we qulickly have to sort out which photos are the best.

    After the video markers are layed down, Steve starts work in the editing room capturing and manually synchronizing the audio play-by-play to video, then compressing the clips for web consumption. Times vary from game-to-game but 6 to 8 hours is pretty much average.