It’s time to get up out of here.
According to The UConn Blog’s content management system, I’ve published 1,075 articles on the site since February 16, 2016, the first of which was a preview for the baseball team’s upcoming season. This is the last one.
Now that the baseball Huskies are done in 2025 and there won’t be any sports until August, which coincides with the impending birth of my first child, it’s time to move on and focus more fully on maintaining a house and being a dad. At one point, I thought that journalism would be a career for me and while it hasn’t happened that way, I had this as an excellent hobby to scratch that itch for nearly a decade, growing from a sophomore in college to someone who is about to be responsible for another human being. The next step in life is here and I don’t want to find myself caught between all the things that will require my attention, so I’m diving head-first into what awaits for me Labor Day weekend.
I’ve been a ton of places, both literally and figuratively, since I recognized Aman’s voice asking a question at a UConn alumni event in Hartford in January 2016 at which Molly Qerim spoke. I didn’t even really want to go, but a friend was going to try to get her to come to a UConn Sport Business Association meeting and I was the one with a car. Thanks for guilting me into that one, Christos. Wouldn’t be here without you.
I had recently taken accounting and realized that business was not for me. I was seeking a new major and didn’t really know where to go from there, so I figured I would try journalism. I mustered up the courage to talk to Aman about helping out and the blog was looking to expand into baseball, a sport about which I knew a ton. Just a couple of weeks later, I was at media day, totally out of my depth. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to even know there were detailed statistics and information on UConn’s website. I was listening to Chris Jones on the radio while the Huskies traveled until the weather broke, keeping score by hand in a scorebook and emailing Aman my game recaps, with an Excel spreadsheet to maintain a statistics database.
Once the Huskies got back north, I didn’t know I was allowed in that small press box above J.O. Christian Field for much of the home slate, instead plopping at the top of the third-base bleachers after class with the scorebook and my phone to live tweet the games, or sometimes whatever wild weather in the forecast.
From there, I was anywhere and writing about anything, taking on men’s hockey and men’s soccer on a full-time basis for two seasons, with a highly active role in men’s basketball for most of my tenure, as well as pitching in on football and other sports at various times. I was even featured in UConn’s pitch to join the Big 12.
I’ve had the privilege of being at multiple Big East Tournaments, NCAA events for baseball and men’s hockey, as well as the 2023 Final Four. The first game I covered was a 2-1 baseball loss from 207 Russell Hall in Northwest at UConn, listening to the radio. It was even a real alarm clock radio because I don’t think WHUS was streaming at the time. The ride ended in northern New Jersey, in the living room of the house I own, watching on TV with my dog. I’ve come a long way.
My now-wife has been a tremendous sport, talking with me about what’s been going on with the men’s hockey team in October and driving home from the Jersey Shore while I watch the baseball selection show in the passenger seat on my phone, ready to fill in the last details for a story I had mostly written before the Memorial Day barbecue started. I was even significantly late for a very early date while we were still in school because a coach that will go unnamed, though they are no longer with the university, decided to skip out on a press conference after a loss without letting anyone know. She could have given me grief, or deemed me flaky and decided it wasn’t worth it. She did neither and here we are. Find yourselves a keeper like that. I wanted to say thank you for supporting me.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to a few folks at UConn, including Chris Jones and Jim Penders with the baseball program, as well as Bill Peterson and Mike Cavanaugh of men’s hockey. The former were the sports information directors for those sports when I was around each team on a day-to-day basis and the latter need no introduction. Each of them treated me like a priority and made sure I was taken care of, even when I was learning the ropes and figuring things out on the fly. I surely made mistakes along the way but it never became a problem. They didn’t need to do that and I am extremely grateful for how they helped me learn and grow in the business. Even if I never entered it as a professional, I still use those skills every day and it has helped immensely.
When I was in college and my friends were joking with me about not going out with them because I was driving to wherever to cover a game, I always replied, semi-seriously, that blog never slept. After all, I was regularly getting back from places all around New England in the wee hours of the morning, often to the chagrin of whoever I was living with at the time. Well, it’s time to go to sleep.
The site, which only covered men’s and women’s basketball and football when I came on board, now owns UConn men’s hockey and baseball coverage, with four specialized newsletters and a broad-based one in addition to the main site. Aman, the Dans, Ian and everyone else with roles big and small will keep on chugging along and I will certainly continue to be a reader and subscriber. Thanks for paying attention over the past nine-plus years, whether it’s been baseball, basketball, football, hockey or the music blaring through whatever arena or stadium from which I was reporting. It’s meant a ton.