A One-Year Experiment Is Enough

As I'm sure you've noticed if you checked the site following basketball season, things have slowed down here at the Society.  In the last few months, I would have liked to find the time to write a post defending Dom Starsia, a good man who in many corners was thrown under the bus for running what was deemed an out-of control program following the tragic death of Yeardley Love. As far as I think the Washington Post came with Zach Berman trying to revive its Virginia coverage, their piece on Starsia following Love's death was nothing short of a one-sided, ignorant hatchet job. I also would have liked to chime in on Mike London's efforts to revive the program -- his outreach to the 757 and the energy he's brought to Charlottesville. Believe me, he's a LONG way away from rebuilding this thing, but the first several months of his tenure have confirmed my belief that the University has the right man for the job.

Simply put, we here at the Society just haven't had enough time to make this site what we wanted when we launched almost to the day last year.  As cjhoo noted, my wife & I welcomed the newest member of Hoo nation in January, and I also switched jobs to a position that will be taking up a lot more of what little was left of my free time.  My colleague cjhoo and his wife are also expecting their first in October, right around the time Mike London might be wondering what he's gotten himself into. So while it was a blast to do for a year, and we'd like to keep it up, its just not realistic at this point.  This will therefore be the last post here at the Society. 

I hope, as had been my goal, that we intelligently added to the discussion.  We tried to thread the needle between the Fourth Estate, the core of which when it comes to UVA sports has been around a LONG time (in some cases too long), and mindless fandom, which far too often litters the internet these days.  But doing a blog on the side did remind me how hard it is to follow a beat full-time, and gave me even more respect for those bloggers who consistently churn out quality content even though they do so in many cases as a second job for little (if any) monetary benefit.  I still think there's a niche out there that's yet to be filled.  When it is, I can promise I will be among that site's most loyal readers.

Shout-out to cjhoo, who carried the water for the site after the birth of my son and really found his groove writing about hoops in the winter.  Shout out to my former colleague and the Sabre's Kris Wright, who was always generous with a link and kind words for the site.  Non-shout out to acccoy, who I asked only to commit if he could contribute but very infrequently did.  We're still waiting on that ACC hoops piece, acccoy (sorry man, couldn't resist).  Shout out to Japers Rink, a Washington Capitals blog that inspired me to start this one. I know there are probably only a handful of hockey fans who followed the Society, but J.P. (thanks for the words of encouragement) and his troupe churn out content of a quality I could only have hoped to do for UVA sports.  Shout out to all those bloggers out there still doing yeoman's work.  I still think each of the other sites out there have a ways to go, but I'll be watching for one to break through.  Good luck boys.  And a final shoutout to our readers.  I appreciate the comments, words of encouragement, and most importanly, visits to the site, each one of which provided just a touch of validation to what we were doing.  I especially appreciated all the traffic around the football coaching search, when I thought we did some of our best work.  Thanks for noticing, and coming by to see what we were writing about.

I'll be leaving the blogspot version of the site up for a while.  Who knows, maybe cjhoo and I will get bored again with our day jobs, recruit some more writers, and make another run at this thing.  Until then, GO HOOS!  Continue reading this post...