LAWRENCE, Kan. – When two American Indian sports fans got together a few
years ago, they saw a void in the media. Nowhere were they able to find a
clearinghouse of information about Indian athletes. Although Indian
athletes were occasionally spotlighted in local newspaper pieces, there was
no place that showcased athletes from all tribes and from all sports. The
two young college students put their heads together and NDNsports.com was
born in 2000.

Brent Cahwee, Euchee/Pawnee, and John Harjo, Creek/Seminole/Shoshone/
Paiute, both college students, were passionate about sports. Their burning
ambition behind the idea for NDN Sports was to provide those who visited
their Web site with up to date information on Indian athletes from across
the country.

By using the idea of “what would we want to see,” the format for the Web
site was born. What made their site even more unique was the fact that
Cahwee and Harjo made it known that they wanted participation from other
sports fans like themselves. Both Cahwee and Harjo knew that the best way
to keep up to date on such a diverse number of sports and athletes was to
make their Web site user friendly so other fans could send in information
on sporting events and athletes from all over Indian country.

Their idea was a success. Not only did the pair of young entrepreneurs make
a niche for themselves on the Web, but they also found an audience hungry
for the information they supplied.

Soon Indian sports organizations realized that the innovative Web site with
the ready-made audience was a great asset to their various sports venues as
well as a way to make Indian athletes known beyond the areas they lived in.
By 2001, the first Native American All-Star Football Game was organized,
giving the best players from across Indian country a chance to show college
scouts what they had to offer.

“This all started when John and I were seniors in college,” Cahwee said.
“John was a senior here [Haskell Indian Nations University] and I was a
senior at Southwest Missouri State. I would come up here frequently to
visit family and friends. He stayed in the dorm in the back with his wife
and kids. This was around the time of the dot com boom. My degree is in
computer information systems and I started doing Web pages back then. John
said he thought we should do a Web site and I asked him what kind. We
decided to do Native American sports. We came up with a lot of different
ideas for the name, but they all ended up being ‘toolong.com’, so we came
up with the acronym NDN Sports. We thought it was catchy so we paid for our
web page and the domain name and got everything going. We had like five
athletes on that first page and we showed it to the world, but we found
there was no one to show it to!”

That first month Cahwee said the Web site had about 30 hits, most of which
he attributed to Harjo and himself. But over the years the duo began
posting on various Native American chat rooms and the public began
responding by letting them know about different Indian stars throughout the
sports world.

“We followed up on everything and added them to our database,” Cahwee said.
“People started visiting the Web site more and it just kept growing. We had
the most hits on Mondays after we had updated the site on Sunday night. We
knew we needed a way to bring people back every day, so we added a forum.
People really started using that. Today half the people come to the forum
and half to the Web site. The growth has been phenomenal.”

The forum has been a boon for Cahwee and Harjo who no longer have to spend
hours online trying to find American Indian athletes at various colleges
and high schools across the country.

“We used to have to do searches of schools and then look at photos and say
‘That person looks Native,’” Cahwee laughed. “Now thanks to the forum
people bring that information to us.”

Although neither Harjo or Cahwee have quit their day jobs to become dot com
millionaires, they have been able to bring their love of American Indian
athletics to a new medium giving hundreds of previously-unknown athletes a
chance to be seen. While Harjo works as a fire fighter, Cahwee works with
information technology at Haskell, but their full-time jobs don’t stop
either from continuing to build on the dream they shared.

“We were two wacky eager kids who wanted to do sports and sell them to
Native newspapers, but no one was interested,” Cahwee said. “We found that
it was the bad stuff that sold. On our Web site we focus on the good stuff.
We promote the athletes and let people know that these kids have
accomplished something that many others haven’t. It’s never been about the
idea of money.”

Cahwee and Harjo are now involved in everything from football to golf and
have become well respected by American Indian sports organizations and
mainstream colleges as well.

“It’s been a wonderful experience being able to help develop Indian
sports,” he concluded. “Our goal has always been to get Native American
college athletes into the professional ring, because we don’t have a lot of
them out there to choose from. Our goal is to help identify those athletes
and give them that encouragement and little extra push and get them into
that world stage. Everyone has a hobby, ours is Native American sports. It
needs to be covered because it just isn’t in the mainstream press. It needs
to be a daily bombardment and it just isn’t there, so that is what we try
to provide on our Web site.”