For most, this will be a rather uninteresting “excuse” post, something I’ve had a bad habit of doing over 5 years of somewhat irregular blogging. As infrequent as my non-Braves posts have been in the last year or so, it will probably come as no surprise that I’ve decided to further reduce my bloggy footprint. Before I get to that, let me give a little backstory.
I graduated from Harding in May 2006 and have written regularly about the Bisons basketball team in this location since the beginning of the 2005-2006 season, my last season regularly attending games in Searcy. I have maintained some form of web footprint for the Bisons (starting with stats only) since early 2004.
Soon after leaving Harding, I merged multiple blogs that I maintained into one location at this current address. I kept up with fairly intensive posts about the Bisons through the ’07-’08 season, as most of the players I followed as a student were still around. Last year, I stopped tracking stats and wrote mostly simple game reviews.
This year, I’m going to quit the game reviews, which will result in even less frequent posting about the Bisons. I’ll admit that I’ve lost some interest in the program in 3 1/2 years away from Searcy, although I’ve still enjoyed attending a few games (including the ’08 GSC tourney in Southaven) and listening on the web. It’s gotten tougher to justify spending my free time tracking stats for my alma mater when I have a full-time job and other things I need to be doing.
Not being able to watch a reasonable number of games was probably hurting my analysis, anyway. No matter how much I focused on the stats here (they do tell us a lot), I couldn’t make a lot of intelligent observations without at least occasionally seeing the team in action. There’s no way I’m paying $5 a pop for terrible video quality on the Penn Atlantic site, and it’s tough to really follow the games on the radio.
Overall, I feel like I put in my time for the team I grew to love over the last 7 years, and I will still follow them as I do my other favorite teams. For a while, HU was the only D-II school with a presence on one of the major blog networks (MVN). Perhaps another enterprising HU student will pick up the slack; I know there’s still a solid fan base and plenty of talented and passionate HU students, and it’s inevitable that someone else (who doesn’t directly work for the school) will take up that challenge at some point and do a far better job than I did.
It was a good run, and I’ve had a blast doing it. I still love analyzing data and writing about it. I just don’t have as much time for it anymore and can’t do the quality of work I take pride in doing.
Looking toward the future, this blog will still include personal stories and other notes about what’s going on in my life. I’ve got plenty of things to write about when I can find the time to do it. In the last month, I’ve seen Muse and U2 live at the Georgia Dome and the Vols beat up on South Carolina for my first game at Neyland Stadium, so I’m not short on experiences to share. I’ll still be writing about the Braves for the foreseeable future as well.
Now that this is out of the way, if anyone knows where I can read some good coverage of the Bisons, link me up. The season starts this weekend, and I’m ready.
jfwiii.net 