A Central Look Back

As the school year comes to an end, I have started to take a look back at all of the sports I have gotten to cover this year.  I have covered basically ever sport at some point or another and it has been a tremendous opportunity.

Not every player gets to talk to coaches and players for a actual job.  Everyone has been great and easy to talk which makes my job, while being an introvert, much easier than it could have been.  interviewing has been a difficult for me, as you can guess from the sentence above.  However, starting back to last summer when I was just in participation, I have grown more confident because of the athletes and coaches.

I started off with email interviews at the very beginning because, well I was scared to do anything else.  My first email interviews were soccer head coach Mike Cook and softball pitcher Kalynn Schrock.  While small, it gave me some confidence that I could get in contact with these athletes  and I began just calling.  Maybe the easiest interview was Dax Leone who I have actually interviewed in person.

There are plenty more interviews to talk about but I figure the the first ones were the biggest in my career so far because they helped me the most.  I have loved every minute of this year and all the sports I have gotten to watch.  It has truly been special.

What I Have Learned

I learned a lot of things from the blog that I adopted and the blogger himself.  The Blog that I adopted was The Sports Fan Journal started by a blogger named Eddie Maisonet.  Maisonet started with a smaller blog called Ed the Sports fan but decided to create another for sports fans.  In my interview with Maisonet he gave me an intriguing insight into his blogging world and also gave me some strong advice for blogging in general.

Maisonet has been blogging for around six years.  He started blogging under Ed the Sports Fan but then started the Sports Fan Journal instead.  He changed his blog because of the amount of writers who wanted to contribute to Ed The Sports Fan.  2011 is when he started his new blog the Sports Fan Journal and there are many more contributors to the blog.  He felt then was the time to make his blog bigger and change.

Maisonet is actually a fellow Oklahoman, growing up in Lawton and going to Lawton Eisenhower high school.  He lived in Oklahoma for 23 years and went to Langston University before moving out of the state.  He now lives in Oakland California and besides his blog he also has a column on another blogging site SB Nation.  He also works for SLAM magazine as well.  He is currently employed at Google and working on his Masters Degree at the University of San Francisco.

When it comes to followers the blog has over five hundred followers while Eddie has over three thousand followers, including some ESPN sports writers as well.  On Facebook the page has over six hundred likes.

When it comes to profits the blog does make some money.  Maisonet says it is enough to pay the phone bill.

I think this blog is not like any other sports blogs is that there is no "play-by-play" blogs like what you see on those other blogs.  The Oklahoma Sports blog as a lot of these, this blog is more opinion oriented. 

There are a couple of strengths to this blog.  Firstly the set up of the blog is well done.  The home page is clean and its not packed full of stories.  If you want to find a story in a category its pretty easy to find.  Another strengthens to me is the writing in and the most of the topics.  They write more in depth opinionated sports articles, which I really like to read.  One topic is a "white team" in the final four. It is a great topic because you do not get topics like that on many blogs.

One weakness though is that there seems to be stories that do not have much to do with the content on the blog. One story talks about Grand Theft Auto which I do not think belongs on the

Ed gave me some great advice for the world of blogging.  The first thing that he told me was to just stick with it.  I was told to set a goal for how much I want to blog and to stick with that goal.  He said that is the only way to learn if I truly enjoy what I am doing or not. The other thing he told fell in line is to find my niche in blogging. He said to find something that involves expertise or access.  Finally, he talked about honing our voice and becoming an authority in blogging.  This is hard because everybody has a blog these days and it takes a lot of repetition to accomplish this goal. This second is important and has been popular advice from others as well.