Matt Nelson is a Utah native, but he loves his suburban Dallas community of Prosper so much he might as well be a homegrown Texan.
Name: Matt Nelson
Site: Prosper Eagle Football
Position: Webmaster
Use of platform: Registration, Sitebuilder
Background: Nelson has been involved in youth sports in the Dallas/Fort Worth area for years, helping manage his two sons’ teams and updating at least portions of websites related to his sons’ activities. “I love to volunteer,” said Nelson, who lives in the far northern Dallas suburbs and whose oldest son, Logan (a junior defensive back) plays varsity football for Prosper High School. “I figure if you want to have really strong community, then everyone needs to be involved.” It should be noted that Nelson doesn’t speak with a Texas y’all accent. Yet. He grew up in northern Utah (Brigham City) and attended nearby Weber State University. He headed south to Texas for work about six years after college, and he’s been living in the Dallas/Fort Worth area for the last 11 years. Despite not being a native Texan, he’s as embedded in the Prosper area as anyone. “This is a fabulous community,” he said. “Everyone is very passionate about the community.” Count football as one of those community passions. “Just about every game, our side of the stands have been very full compared to the home side,” Nelson said.
What he does: Nelson, who works in IT as a Senior Quality Analyst, learned the basics of the SportsEngine platform after volunteering to manage team pages when one of his sons played soccer for Liverpool Football Academy’s Dallas-based club. The other son played baseball in nearby Frisco, and Nelson, naturally, volunteered to keep stats and help update that team page, too. Nelson upped his involvement last summer when he agreed to manage the Prosper Eagle Football site just after it had migrated to the SportsEngine platform. He’s thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the home page, using an array of page elements that showcase everything from professional quality highlight videos, upcoming game information, district standings (the Eagles sit in a tie for first place), social media feeds and sponsor information. He manages a registration that allows fans to join the Eagle Touchdown Club, donate money and buy season tickets. “It’s a lot easier way to do it than making it a print-out-this-paper-and-mail-it-in kind of thing,” Nelson said.
Making his mark: Nelson set up a neatly organized Sponsors page with a hierarchy that leaves no doubt as to who is the title sponsor.
Fun fact: Prosper, which dubs itself as, “A place where everyone matters,” more than doubled in size from 2010 to 2017, when its estimated population grew from about 9,000 to 21,685.
