College basketball is a funny sport. Something like 40 percent of the regular season takes place in November and December, when almost nobody is paying attention. Another big chunk happens in January, when football still dominates the national conversation. Only once the Super Bowl ends, and March Madness becomes the “next big thing” on the sports calendar, do casual fans really start paying attention.
Knowing this, my original plan was that February would be the month when Pioneer Pulse really takes off. I’d do some more in-depth and featurey type blog posts, I’d try more aggressively to advertise the site to potentially interested DU and Denver types, and I’d generally gear up for the coming push toward the postseason.
Alas, the opposite is going to be true. For personal reasons wholly unrelated to the team or the season or basketball, I’m going to need to take a step back from my DU blogging for the rest of the regular season — we’ll cross the March bridge when we come to it — and let my new @PioneerPulse Twitter account do the heavy lifting through February.
I’m sure the blog’s dozen regular readers are crushed. 🙂
I kid, but in all seriousness, I realize I do have some committed and interested readers, and I realize that early February is a terrible time to do this. But I have to keep my priorities straight. This blog is a personal project, a hobby, not something I’m required to do or something I get paid to do. And I’m simply spending too much time, losing too much sleep and neglecting too much else, most of all the pampering of my lovely pregnant wife — all in the service of a blog project that, frankly, I’d need to spend even more time on in order to really be happy with it. I feel like I’m doing the bare minimum, if that, and it’s still too much. Turns out I just don’t have time for a full-time job, two adorable yet demanding children, a charming yet needy wife, and a gig as a fake journalist. Go figure. 🙂 If this were Twitter, I might add the hashtag #BitOffMoreThanICouldChew.
So, here’s the plan, in two parts:
1) Thursday night, in the midst of National Pixelvision Day, in order to avoid “Twitter Jail” and stop clogging everyone’s feeds, I created a new Twitter account, @PioneerPulse. Going forward, I’ll be letting that account handle essentially all my coverage.
In place of the individual “live-tweeting” post for each games, a single post will soon appear above this one, which will display all of my relevant tweets, imported automatically into a CoverItLive window. It will be there both during games and in between them, with readers invited to either comment or tweet back at me. Live-tweeting of games will continue, but will at times be less intense than it has sometimes been. For instance, I’m not necessarily going to frantically scramble to live-tweet when it conflicts with bedtimes and the like. Most importantly, I won’t be doing full-length blog write-ups of the games afterward — a task that, when I do it, takes hours, believe it or not. Instead, everything will appear via Twitter.
Also, I most likely will not be attending two of Denver’s final three home games. I definitely won’t be at Florida Atlantic, due to a schedule conflict. I’ll probably attend either UL-Monroe or South Alabama, but not both. As for the postseason: we’ll see. Right now, I’ve got a ticket booked to fly to Little Rock for the conference championship game in Hot Springs, if Denver makes it that far (to be canceled if they don’t; it’s a Southwest ticket). Whether I’ll ultimately go if that happens remains up in the air at the moment. I lean toward yes, but we’ll see.
2) If any of my DU-interested readers want to help pick up the slack, and do some Pioneer coverage of your own here, e-mail me at du@brendanloy.com and let’s talk. I can make you a guest-blogger, and I can talk to the Denver SID folks to see if they’ll credential you to go to the games I’m missing and sit on press row and report in my place. I have no idea if that’s possible, but I can ask.
Again, I know this is a bummer for the small but committed group that’s followed and enjoyed what I’ve written here since November, and to those people, I sincerely apologize. I had every intention of seeing this through to the end of the season, full speed ahead — indeed, accelerating to the big finish — but it has proven to be the last straw that’s overwhelmed me in a very busy winter, and I’ve got to prioritize. Again, if you want to help keep the blog going through February as more than just a glorified Twitter shell, e-mail me.
Go Pioneers!