The time has come

The 2019-20 season ended abruptly, and we are very much in uncharted waters, with uncertainty ruling the day as some schools will try to play football while most will not. Many other fall sports have been canceled, and who knows what will happen for college basketball as of yet even as there is hope for a season of some sort. There are many questions about the NBA Draft, recruiting, and on the whole, the future of college athletics. What any of them will really look like a few months from now is just a guessing game.

But there is one part of the future I am very certain of: I won’t be among those covering what happens. The time has come to move on from Hoopville after over 18 years.

Now that the formality is out of the way, there is much to talk about with it. I felt it made sense to get the bottom line out of the way rather than build up to it with some kind of suspense. It has long been unthinkable that such a day would ever come.

First, a big thank you is in order to our readers for consuming what we produced on the sport we all love. While we loved writing whether we had an audience or not, I hope you found our content valuable and informative whether it was an in-depth player feature, talent evaluation from an event or something a little more analytical on how a team was thriving or struggling. A big thank you also goes out to the many sports information/media relations directors (the unsung heroes in this business), college coaches and administrators, high school and travel team coaches, event directors and fellow media colleagues who all helped make this an amazing ride. I also thank all of those who competed in our events, hoping that you gained something from them.

And last but certainly not least, a thank you to all of those who have been a part of Hoopville, from founder Andrew Flynn and one-time main partner Michael Protos all the way down to lasting contributors Paul Borden, Ray Floriani, Adam Glatczak and Ted Sarandis. While I contributed to other sites over the years, including before this, Hoopville is the unquestioned center of gravity of my basketball life.

To start, this decision was not made on or after March 12, 2020, when the college basketball season came to an abrupt end and the world changed. This was a thought going back to last summer, when the way I described my thought process about the future was that it would depend on the day. One day, I felt like I was at the end, and the next day, I was fired up, as if I could do this for another 10 years easily and with the kind of constant coverage I did in the halcyon days about a decade earlier. I went into the season knowing this might be it for me.

Finally, by the time February rolled around I knew this season would be the end. There’s a relatively simple equation involved. For starters, the business viability is simply not there, and is not likely to be any more so in the foreseeable future due to a few factors even before the pandemic. All the while, I have a day job with a lot of demands but also a lot of potential, and other opportunities outside the world of basketball are presenting themselves as well. The returns on this – even from a non-financial standpoint, it should be noted – had already diminished.

In a sense, this was a couple of years in the making. In two straight recent off-seasons, technical issues sidelined us for a significant period of time. This forced time away was also time where I didn’t feel the way I probably would have about a decade earlier, where I likely would have gone stir crazy. Instead, I had plenty of other things occupying my mind and my time, and while I was happy to be back up and running when those issues finally got resolved, the time away from it was perhaps a sign that I was on borrowed time. The lag between when the season ended and when this comes out is attributable largely to life getting in the way while working to unwind the operation.

If business viability was the only factor, the calculus is different. Even the great events we ran, notably the Hoopville Spring Finale, rarely came and went without having to come out of my own pocket, and often after many headaches making them happen in the first place. No one should shed a tear for me, though, much as during the planning of those events and making them happen there were times I thought of it as a thankless job. I don’t regret giving the Boston kids a chance to play in front of family and friends in a good setting, against good competition from down the east coast and in Canada, and in the case of events like the New England Junior Best 40, a chance to get good training and thus get better. I also don’t regret helping a few kids from the city every year go to important camps in July back when that was the most important month of the year from a recruiting standpoint. Youth sports are about the kids, and while I believed that before Hoopville was even founded (I did not join until February of the site’s first season), now I believe that more than ever and with every fiber of my being.

The lack of profit never stopped me from covering over 100 college games in a number of seasons (five in a row at one point), and often a good number of high school and prep school games on nights without a college game. I was fortunate at the time to live within an hour of a number of Division I schools that represented quite a few conferences. As a result, I not only had many choices and access to many schools from around the eastern half of the country, but I also didn’t have many true nights off. One of the fun exercises every fall used to be printing out a blank calendar and subsequently filling it in with college games in the area, and later prep school and high school games as those schedules became available, then figure out which ones to cover. In some later years, this all happened in September and early October as I traveled far and wide to many prep schools in New England, sometimes two or even three in a day (the good old days were the ones where you could hit the Winchendon School, Notre Dame Prep and Cushing Academy all in one day, or perhaps substitute Lawrence Academy for one of them).

Even last season, when I was home watching games on TV, that was one thing, but when I was in an arena to cover a game, it felt like old times. When I was in that setting, it was amazing like it always has been. The game is wonderful to witness up close and with stories worth sharing, and in the case of the college game, the kids are always changing even though some things, from coaches to athletic directors to SIDs to lively atmospheres, might stay the same.

I led a basketball life for the better part of two decades, and the game gave me more than I could ever hope to give it in return. It brought me to many places, from all over New England to the Triangle in North Carolina, to Tulsa and St. Louis, as well as the likes of Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis and even Chicago. I have been to great venues like Madison Square Garden, the Palestra, Barclays Center, Xfinity Center, United Center and Capital One Arena (back when it was both the MCI Center and later the Verizon Center), as well as lesser-known but still great ones like the RAC, Constant Convocation Center and Siegel Center to name a few. I was fortunate to cover many great games, including significant ones like NCAA Tournament regional finals, the first time in a quarter century that Morehead State went to the NCAA Tournament, Vermont’s win over Syracuse in the 2005 NCAA Tournament, the last Big East Tournament before it split in 2013, the last Mid-Continent Conference Tournament (before it became the Summit League), an NIT championship game, the last game ever played in Stony Brook’s Pritchard Gymnasium and so much more. I’ve been a media voter for conference awards and enjoyed attending a number of Media Day events, primarily in the CAA, an incredibly well-run conference whose tournament I have also covered many times. Included in those many CAA Tournaments is one of the greatest games I covered – the 2015 semifinal between William & Mary and Hofstra, just a few days after I covered another double overtime thriller between Sacred Heart and Bryant.

I am fortunate to have met many great people along the way through this, because it’s a people business. Over the years, I spent many nights out with media colleagues (Friday and Saturday nights of Memorial Day weekend at Bailey’s in North Carolina are legendary), have been to the homes of coaches, had my taxes done by the wife of a college coach, and shared plenty of great stories of being on the road with them. It’s tempting to start naming people, but I instantly don’t feel okay about that idea because I know I’ll forget some who are very worthy of mention. One that I will mention, though, is Tom Konchalski, since I wrote about his retirement a little while back, and when he retired, to me it further drove home the idea that the time is right for me to move on from this. Tom is one of many great people I miss in not getting out to cover recruiting events for most of the site’s final years.

Through all of this, I hope I have given our readers even a tiny fraction of what I have received from the game. I have done my best to be informative and fair in my coverage. In evaluating players, I always felt a player had to earn a favorable evaluation, and if he didn’t play well or showed a clear weakness, that needed to be talked about as well as his strengths, mindful that these kids are not finished products – indeed, we as adults are never finished products no matter what we do for a living. I would not evaluate a player I did not see, which sometimes meant elite players because despite my best efforts, it’s impossible to see all of the kids at most events (and in some, at best you see about 10 percent of the kids). In evaluating teams, I always felt I had to reflect reality, and that included writing tough stories even when I personally liked the coaches and/or kids. And hopefully all of the kids who competed in the events we ran felt like they gained something from it. They are the ones who count the most, which is also why when I got to know them, I would be sure to encourage them not only on the court but off it as well. I made sure to point out many times that since they have the talent to succeed on the court, they also have the talent to succeed in the classroom as well.

So have I gone from practically living in basketball gymnasiums to being all done with the sport? Yes – for now. I’ve always cared about college basketball and never desired to cover the NBA, because there’s just something about the college game, about being on a college campus and players in such varying stages of development on and off the floor. Words can’t describe it or the feeling I always got when I arrived at a gym/arena for a game or series of games, whether the matchup was Duke at Maryland, Central Connecticut at Bryant, or an Ivy League game on a cold Friday night at Harvard or Brown (or even Yale on a few occasions). From the moment I walked in until the moment I walked out, it was a few hours of boundless enjoyment.

Should this pandemic subside to the point where much of everyday life is back to something resembling “normal,” I’ll be watching plenty of games on TV next season. I’m sure I’ll feel the urge to write on occasion, too – it’s only natural, because writing is one thing I do, whether it’s code or on a blog like this or my blog on my personal site. I’ll probably tweet a little as well. But I’m being called to other opportunities right now, and that call must be answered.

Hoopville has run its course for me, something that for so long was unfathomable. My time writing here covers most of my adult life to this point. My name is on well over 2,000 pieces of content on this site alone, in addition to other sites I have contributed to during this time. Memorably, I once churned out three stories from Georgetown’s double overtime win at UConn on February 27, 2013, two on here and one for another site. But there’s an old saying that all good things must come to an end. Andrew Flynn got this all started in the fall of 2001, then touched base with me in February 2002 about joining the fledgling site. It was an opportunity, and I ran with it more than I could have ever imagined.