This is a guest blog
written by Keith Wedinger who is the webmaster and team statistician for the
Dublin Scioto High School football team in Dublin, Ohio. Learn more about Keith
by visiting him on Facebook or @jkwuc89 on Twitter.

Four years ago, I wanted
to make the switch from a Windows-based Gateway laptop to a MacBook Pro but
there was one critical Windows software package that was preventing me from
switching: Stat Crew Football.  I also needed to develop and maintain
Sciotofootball.com on this same laptop, which meant that I needed a web server
that supported PHP and MySQL.  Using multiple laptops was not an option.
This switch barrier was removed when Parallels Desktop for the Mac was
introduced.  Once Parallels came out, switching to a MacBook Pro became a
no-brainer.  Today, I run Parallels Desktop 5 on my 2^nd MacBook Pro, a 17” model with Intel’s Core i7 processor, 8
GB of RAM and a 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive. Here is how.

On my MacBook Pro, I
organize my workspace into 4 different Spaces.  Spaces 1, 3 and 4 contain my OS X
working environment (1 is for browsing/e-mail/office apps, 3 and 4 are for
software and website development).  Space 2 is for my Windows 7 VM running
under Parallels.  I use Ctrl + 1, 2, 3 or 4 to quickly switch between the
spaces.

Inside my Windows 7 VM,
I run Stat Crew Football, a software package used nationwide by high schools
and colleges to collect and report game and season statistics.  It is a
combination of several applications. For example, there is a text-based
application that I use to collect the football plays while the game is being
played.  It uses hotkeys for the plays
(like R for run, P for pass, K for kicks). Behind the scenes, the application
calculates all of the game statistics. There are also GUI based applications in
Stat Crew Software which are used to generate HTML reports for each game and
the season. Here are all of these apps in action inside my Windows 7
Parallels VM:

After generating the game and season reports in my VM, I transfer the files over to my Mac's home
directory via Parallels’ excellent support for sharing files and directories
between OS X and the VM.  I then switch to an OS X space to integrate the
reports into my local copy of sciotofootball.com, which runs on the Apache Web Server included
with OS X.  Once I verify that my local copy of the website looks good, I
upload the site updates to my hosting company’s server.

If you think running
Windows’ applications is preventing you from switching to Mac, it is time to
think again.  Parallels Desktop is fast, powerful and very stable. 
And it makes running Windows alongside OS X on a single system easy and very
productive.