This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on August 5, 2008.

Fantasy Football has nearly become a sport unto itself. For football fans, it’s the next best thing to actually watching football. And for some, being “involved” in the sport in this way is much better. So a fantasy football league would be a great community gathering event for a library of any size. But manually running a fantasy football league is tough work. Thankfully, Yahoo has a full set of tools available to create and run a league through their Yahoo Fantasy Sports section. They do all the work and the cost is next to nothing.

For a librarian on a tight programming budget, the fact that running a league through Yahoo Fantasy Football is free is the best part. The only costs might be a few prizes for the top players or the pizza and wings that would be a necessity at any “Draft Day” event.

Yahoo allows for the creation of Custom Leagues where nearly every setting is editable. Leagues can be created in the two most popular fantasy sports styles: “Head-To-Head” or “Points.” Definitions of nearly every term used in fantasy football (and details on how Yahoo’s system in particular works) can be found on Yahoo’s Help Pages.

The Fantasy Draft itself can be turned into a huge event with a few pizzas and wings and soda. To get the rest of the community involved, it would be easy to take a whiteboard and post the league standings somewhere in the library. Weekly league meetings could even be held (on Sunday afternoons of course and with a little football on a TV) to encourage people to stick with the league.

While a season-long fantasy football league is not a “traditional” library program (or even technically a “video game”), it definitely fits in with the idea that many librarians share that libraries should be community meeting places.