Welcome to a new and unique way to follow University of Iowa athletics.

The new part speaks for itself with this being the launch date for allhawkeyes.com.

Let me explain what makes us unique, beginning with our approach to covering the Hawkeyes. We plan to operate sort of like a newspaper and a recruiting service rolled into one information center.

Myself, and co-owner Rob Howe, combine to have over 30 years of experience working for newspapers. We’ll use that experience to cover the Iowa football team and the Iowa men’s basketball team on a beat basis, writing feature stories, columns, game stories and breaking news when it happens.

Football and basketball will be our primary focus. But we also will cover the rise of the Iowa baseball team under Rick Heller, the prolonged excellence of the Iowa wrestling program under Tom Brands, the emergence of the Iowa volleyball program under Bond Shymansky and the success of the Iowa women’s basketball team under veteran coach Lisa Bluder, along with other UI sports.

But that’s just half of our mission. The other half of our mission is to make allhawkeyes.com a trusted source for Iowa football and men’s basketball recruiting.

I look forward to helping Rob on the recruiting trail, partly because I enjoy the challenge, but also because Hawkeye fans enjoy recruiting to put it mildly. Some fans have told me that following recruiting is almost an obsession for them.

Rob and I plan to feed that obsession on a daily basis with all sorts of recruiting updates. It’s easy to parachute in with coverage when a recruit makes a verbal commitment or on national signing day. But we plan to chronicle the recruiting grind in both sports, from the time a kid gets an offer from Iowa to when he or she signs a national letter of intent.

Recruiting is a fluid situation that requires a watch-dog mentality in order to cover it effectively. Rob has had that mentality for over a decade as a publisher of a Hawkeye recruiting website. He knows the lay of the land and has developed numerous contacts along the way.

One thing Rob didn’t have at his previous job, however, was somebody to share the daily responsibility of covering recruiting. He now has that with me on board.

Rob and I met in 1997 when he moved from New Jersey to work for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. I had been working at the Press-Citizen since 1991 and stayed there until last October when my job was eliminated as newspapers continue to downsize.

Rob left the Press-Citizen in 2003 to work for a Hawkeye recruiting website, but he never left Iowa City.

The fact that Rob and I both live in Iowa City is another thing that makes our website unique because no other news outlet besides the Daily Iowan has all of its reporters living in town.

We decided since the Press-Citizen is now out-sourcing its coverage of Iowa football and men’s basketball to the Des Moines Register that it was time to fill a local void. Rob and I believe strongly that Iowa City deserves to have local coverage of the Hawkeyes.

Another thing that makes our site unique is the $45 price for a year subscription and the $5 price for a month-long subscription. Most of the websites that cover Hawkeye athletics charge nearly three times that much.

We’re also proud to say that 3 percent of our revenue will be donated to the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital.

So if you’re looking for informative, insightful and unbiased coverage of the Hawkeyes, please check us out.  We think we can meet that challenge on a daily basis.