Rivals.com was originally founded in 1998 by Jim Heckman in Seattle, Washington. Heckman is the son-in-law of Don James, the former head football coach at the University of Washington, where Hickman attended school and was later involved in a recruiting scandal. Rivals.com employed a subscription fee of $10.00 per month to users for access to the latest recruiting news and to participate in various message boards dedicated to schools being covered by the network. With money from venture capital firms, Rivals acquired AllianceSports, a regional network that primarily covered college sports in the Southeast of the United States, on January 2000. During that period, Rivals.com employed close to 200 people, operated a network of 700 independent websites, filed for an initial public offering wo