Today marks the start of our 15th year of covering Division I college baseball
For those of you new to the site or who don’t know our history, bear with me for a quick stroll down memory lane.
For years, Phil Stanton and I had talked about starting a college baseball website. We met when I was playing college baseball and he was our sports information director. I learned early on that if you couldn’t sneak onto the senior van – yeah, we traveled in three non-descript vans, studying by dome light or sleeping in any available space be it on the floor or on top of equipment bags – you wanted to be on whatever van Phil was on. For starters, you could get a glimpse of stats and how the team was doing on paper. You also could talk baseball and baseball trivia all night long.
After I graduated in 1996, Phil and I stayed in touch and started talking about a website around 2000. Two years later, we launched.
Our goal back in 2002 was simple: to promote and cover the great things happening in college baseball. Back then, Baseball America, Collegiate Baseball and USA Today were the leaders in national college baseball coverage. The only place we could find (most) daily scores was on The Boston Globe’s website as it picked up scores off the Associated Press wire. We wanted to do what we could to shine more light on the sport.
Fast forward to today, and college baseball coverage never has been stronger. In addition to the pioneers at Baseball Americaand Collegiate Baseball, there now are a couple handfuls of websites that cover the sport and some really good people who are passionate about the game. And ESPN, whose College World Series coverage dates to the early 1980s and sparked my love of college baseball, has done wonders for the sport in recent years – coverage of the tournament continues to get better and better, and its investment has fueled regional and national coverage of games throughout the season.
We couldn’t be more thrilled.
The past 14 years have been a wonderful ride. What started out as “daily scores and more” has turned into what you see here today, a revamped website that is more mobile friendly and a little easier to navigate. A lot of what we’ve done in recent years, we’ll continue to do. And we’ll be incorporating a few new things over the coming weeks.
We run our site for one simple reason: We love college baseball. We have full-time jobs, part-time passions and loving families that fill our days. But college baseball consumes our afternoons, evenings and weekends.
We are grateful to those of you who support us, whether this is your first visit or if you’ve been a daily visitor since 2002. We can’t say thank you enough to the college baseball coaches, administrators and players who have shared their insights and stories. And thank you to legions of college baseball fans who have supported us along the way.
We’d also be remiss if we didn’t thank all our contributors over the years. We’ve had interns who have gone on to intern or work at places like Baseball America, Perfect Game, Fox Sports and even National Geographic. Other contributors continue to cover the sport for other national websites or local sites or newspapers – they’ve helped us cover Regionals and Super Regionals far and wide over the past handful of years.
First pitch for the 2016 season is later this week. Thanks for joining us on the Road to Omaha.