Go team!(SPORTS [biz])

• Author: Schley, Stewart

If a Denver-based startup has its way, high-school athletes from around the country are about to get their 15 minutes of fame.

Jookt.com, operating from an office near Cherry Creek, is a new online media venture designed to give high school athletes, coaches and parents a place to share stories and moments from the field of play.

The idea was conceived by Jeff Bennis, a former cable TV executive who worked for Rifkin & Associates, one of several cable companies that made Denver the unofficial industry capital during the 1980s.

Bennis, who was captain of his high-school football team in Wyomissing, Pa., in the mid- 1970s, began thinking several years ago about business ventures that could tap into the enthusiasm and volume of participants tied to high-school sports.

Bennis is fond of describing Jookt as a venture where "ESPN SportsCenter meets You Tube," and a quick roam around the site supports the notion. Combining amateur short-form video clips with polished features produced in-house by Jookt, the site offers a look at high school sports from lots of angles.

Recently on Jookt, a hilarious clip of a soccer goalie getting conked in the head by a ricocheting shot was juxtaposed with a Jookt-produced feature on Jose Astorga, a Douglas County high school running back, interspersed with play highlights and looking very much like a vignette you'd see on a local TV news station.

The presentation values are well beyond the ramshackle approach adopted by You Tube, Google's popular website for user-generated video. Somewhere behind the scenes, editors adorn user-contributed clips with clever text summations, and Jookt (unlike You Tube) insists on screening and vetting all contributed content before it gets posted. About 20 percent of the site's content is shot, edited and produced by Jookt, and the remainder comes from athletes, parents and coaches.

For now, much of the focus is on Colorado high school sports, which offers a sort of proving ground for the nascent website's operations. But the ambition is to build a national following that attempts to draw users from the 14-to-18-year-old demographic that's Jookt's prime audience target.

Bennis hopes to make money through advertising, but the business plan extends beyond the passive banner-style display ads that once were counted on to propel a new online media business. Instead, the strategy is to weave sponsor presence throughout...