About Utopia

Site Owner, Managing Editor:
TrickyD – Rick Peyton

Site Administrator:
CMQ – Kirk Hemmen

Site Administrator:
Irishman – Chris McShane

Please refer to the site as ncaaStrategies.com. To avoid confusing with any organizations with a similar name, the ‘non contact armchair athletes’ acronym should be in lower-case format (ncaaStrategies).

Media sources that have mentioned ncaaStrategies.com (or sister site freencaa09rosters.com) include the Wall Street Journal, the Calgary Herald, the EA Sports website, Kotaku, GameSpot, and pastapadre.com.

The Early Years

ncaaStrategies.com / Utopia began back in mid 2002 prior to the release of NCAA Football 2003. The original site administrator TrickyD (Rick) had recently relocated to Alabama from Green Bay, Wisconsin and became a huge fan of the NCAA Football series playing NCAA Football 2002 on his PS2 as a means of transitioning himself from an NFL only fan to a college fan to fit in among the SEC crazies. Being new to the state and not having formed many new acquaintances he got involved in the online community at NCAA Heaven and built a very rough website that the NCAA Heaven administrators hosted for him on their servers. This website held mostly recruiting strategies and other miscellaneous documents related to dynasty play on NCAA Football 2002 and there might be a couple hundred people in the world who ever saw it, but that site was called NCAA Utopia.

NCAA Utopia was only a couple of months old when NCAA Heaven and Madden Planet began to have growing pains with their GameSpy hosted servers and decided to go it alone. That little NCAA Utopia site was not invited along as part of that server switch and left TrickyD looking for a new place to host the site. Luckily his need coincided with GameSpy’s desire to fill the sports gaming void left by the departure of NCAA Heaven. They asked TrickyD if he thought he could run a forum and a couple of days later the first members, some of which still post today, joined the website.

NCAA Football 2003 and 2004 were a critical success for EA Sports and so too were they for NCAA Utopia. Those releases helped fuel Utopia’s growth and take its place as the largest and most dedicated NCAA Football video game community on the net.

Eventually NCAA Utopia outgrew the GameSpy servers as well and the community decided to rebrand itself as Utopia Football with the domain UtopiaFootball.com

An Established Community

During this time period TrickyD decided he needed a break from the day to day admin duties of the site and asked long time forum member cmq (Kirk) to take over. cmq helped guide the site through difficult financial times as the costs of hosting a popular website soared. cmq was also responsible for holding the community together through what most members would define as less than stellar NCAA Football series releases. Under cmq’s watch Utopia came to be known as a community of mature and accountable members in a sea of forums filled with anonymous e-bullies. He may also be the only forum user in the history of the internet to never change his avatar.

With the NCAA series struggling Utopia attempted to rebrand itself again as Utopia College Sports (utopiacollegesports.com) and open up its focus to other games in hopes of catching fire again.

Ultimately that initiative failed, but it showed us that while we have a very diverse group of members with unique interests, college football will always be the glue that holds us all together.

Utopia Now

When the domain ncaaStrategies.com came available it seemed like the perfect opportunity to rebrand and put our focus back where it belonged. The ncaaStrategies.com domain defines our purpose, a group of armchair athletes (non-contact armchair athlete Strategies) brought together to talk gaming strategies. We haven’t forgotten where we started though and Utopia remains the home of our community forums at ncaaStrategies.com/Utopia

With TrickyD and cmq both married and taking on new commitments and opportunities a new administrator was needed. cdj (Chris) now led the community into its next chapter and started off with a bang by establishing a direct line of communication between the community and EA Sports. cdj also lead the charge in seeding the site with a content rich homepage and has recorded a series of popular podcasts.

As time went on, a renewed passion for TrickyD has him back at the helm of ncaaStrategies! With a little luck, great leadership and an amazing community we hope that ncaaStrategies.com / Utopia will remain the resource of choice for NCAA Football & NCAA Basketball gamers for years to come.

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