As college basketball fans prepare for the NCAA's 'Final Four' weekend, scheduled this weekend in Indianapolis, their ritual doesn't have to include the smoke-filled sports bar or the living room TV set... just their web-enabled phone or PDA.

TotalSports.net has been partnered with the NCAA for the last four years, offering TotalCasts of basketball, football and baseball games. This March, they announced wireless updates of the Men's and Women's Basketball Tournaments as a free service. The updates were available for WAP-enabled devices, SMS-enabled phones, and PDAs such as the Palm VII.

The offering was a hit -- traffic to TotalSports.net doubled from the previous year's tournament coverage, with over 1,000 hits per day coming from wireless users.

"I wouldn't say that we were surprised by the increase in traffic," said Colin Boatwright, TotalSports.net CTO. "Where I was surprised was the larger demand for WML updates, rather than HTML - the difference in technology rather than response."

Wireless updates from TotalSports.net have been in the works for the last year, with testing and tweaking during the Georgia Tech - Georgia football game and the Gator Bowl on New Year's Day.

"We spent a lot more time on strategy [of how to introduce the updates] than we did on deploying the technology. That probably took all of a weekend to work out the publishing aspect," said Ahmed El-Ramly, TotalSports.net Project Engineer.

The updates are done by a pair of technicians in real time, with wireless-modem laptops sending the information to the site's North Carolina offices. The information is then routed through both the web site's TotalCast system (sending live scores and stats to the Web) and to the wireless publishing system, reformatting it for WML, SMS, and PQA simultaneously. Rather than using another firm's publishing system, the code was done internally to allow for scalability.

Boatwright understands the opportunity to leapfrog the 'big players' in online sports.

"True, ESPN.com and FoxSports.com also offer this service, but their service is weaker, and they also don't market it at all," Boatwright said.

Coverage of the NCAA Basketball Tournament is only the beginning, according to Boatwright.

"We plan on tapping into WML 1.1 and offering more bells and whistles, but the focus will always be on content. Fantasy sports players will be able to track their rotisserie teams using their wireless devices. We'll be offering WML and SMS updates of Major League Baseball games as the season starts up, NFL games, and college football and basketball games.

"Eventually, users will be able to go to mywap.totalsports.net and set up personalized content pushed to their devices. We have over 100 different sites offering very unique content, and that will all be available for people to pick and choose from," Boatwright said.