Welcome to my new sports newsletter

Do you remember what you wanted to do for a living when you were in the eighth grade?

I wanted to be a sportswriter, something I concluded after being assigned a project in English class: Pick a career, research it and prepare a report.

As a sports fanatic who loves writing, I figured it was a natural fit… and about 28 years later here I am writing about sports.

I’ve told some version of that story many times over the years, and I figured it was worth repeating for people I’ve never met personally who might be curious to see what I’m doing after nine years at the Dayton Daily News, Springfield News-Sun and Journal-News.

I learned a lot from that research project, most notably that being a sportswriter was no way to get rich.

(I guess a lot of the other things weren’t really news — you watch sports, write about them, and the stories get published in the newspaper or a magazine — so that’s what stuck out.)

Money isn’t everything, but knowing before I went down this road I needed other motivations was probably valuable in motivating me to stick with it for more than 20 years.

I wanted to do this not only for the chance to get paid to watch sports but also the freedom such a career seemed to provide. To make a long story short, I never wanted to have to call off work to watch the NCAA Tournament on a weekday afternoon, and being required to be at Ohio Stadium on Saturdays in the fall is definitely a feature, not a bug.

In keeping with that line of thinking, my latest career move was much more about freedom than finance — though I do need to make money, so I will be writing for several sites while building out this site. For now, the plan is for this to be a free newsletter, but that doesn’t mean it will be forever.

Nonetheless, I am grateful for the opportunity to work for newspapers I grew up reading, to follow in the footsteps of writers like Hal McCoy, Tom Archdeacon, Gary Nuhn, Chick Ludwig and many others in previous generations. I got to do a lot of cool stuff while on the staff of the Dayton Daily News — including cover the National Championship Game, two Rose Bowls, multiple Opening Days and the first Bengals playoff win since I was 8 — but I also got tired of the incessant grind of the daily news schedule.

I never knew what it was like to have to go up against a hard evening print deadline every single day, but the need to feed the content beast on digital 24/7 is probably a lot worse for quality of life.

I’m also looking forward to having more time to devote to being the best dad and husband I can be, not to mention making sure the world’s largest wannabe lapdog gets plenty of attention and my three dozen tomato plants never need to wait to be pruned or fertilized.

We all have our different motivations, and those are some of mine.

As fate would have it, my first week back in the world of freelancing coincides both with the start of the Ohio State football preseason and the 186th Greene County Fair.

When you read this, there is a good chance I’ll be in Xenia or Columbus, and the ability to attend both without getting anyone’s permission was yet another motivating factor.

Above all, though, I want to have fun, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading. That’s what this is all about at the end of the day. Sports are about celebrating, commiserating, joy, complaining — I’m sure you’ll find all of that here.

Oh, what might you expect to be reading here?

I guess I should get to that before I go.

I expect the main focus to be Ohio State. I plan to do a weekly roundup of news about the Buckeyes, combining my own insights with links to stuff from around the OSU sports web. There is lots of good stuff out there, and I am looking to complement it more than compete with everyone else.

I’ve labeled this site, “Sports from the Southwest Ohio perspective” because, well, yes, Ohio State is not in Southwest Ohio, but I like to think I have some unique points of view, and I plan to write about more than just the Buckeyes.

I occasionally got to write about the Reds and Bengals at my old job, and I intend to keep doing that here — probably in much the same fashion as the random blogs I posted when something got me excited or stuck in my craw.

So if you’re an Ohio State fan who also follows the Reds and Bengals, this should be the perfect place for you. (I happen to think that is an under-represented cohort in Ohio State sports circles, but we’ll have time to explore that theory later.)

And if you only follow one of those teams, I hope you’ll stick around anyway (and I am pretty sure I can target only the posts you want for your inbox).

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

At any rate, thanks for reading, and please share with anyone you think might be interested in following along!