While this may technically be the first post written in this blog, this will serve more as an introduction than anything else. First, lets talk about how this came about.
It starts all the way back in 2014 when I was working for the Tennessee Smokies. I worked as a Media Relations intern for the team and also wrote for the Smokies website and the Smokies on Radio Network blog. When I signed up for the job, I didn’t realize I had do some broadcasting as well, and honestly I was glad I did. It allowed me to improve on my skills in broadcasting world even though I wasn’t planning on doing that with my life. It doesn’t hurt to have those skills if something that required broadcasting came up, right? Some of my co-workers at the time and now friends put together a podcast we called “Smokies Now” and after doing that for a few months I realized making podcasts were fun to do. If I was to go into broadcasting, it would be a sports talk show (TV or Radio or both). On the other side of things, I love to write about sports too.
So the next year I decided to put together my very own sports blog which I called The Sports Fanatical. In my blog I wrote opinion pieces, previews, reviews, columns, and I also did podcasts. That was absolutely perfect in my mind. I got so involved with it that it felt like a job, but at least it was fun. The next year when working for the Cincinnati Reds I was able to do a lot of work on the blog as new ideas kept popping up in my head to write or podcast about. Things were great until March of 2017 when the website I used changed it’s whole entire format. I couldn’t post podcasts unless I used SoundCloud, which I had to pay for if I wanted to keep all that I’ve done, articles past October 2016 were suddenly gone, I couldn’t see my audience numbers, and it also lost all the functions that were free. Essentially, what made the website so great for my platform did not work for me anymore. I’ll continue to use it until I get another job that pays more and allows me to afford to move it to WordPress which can allow me to pay for another blog on this website, but it’s disappointing to see that happen to what was a great sports blog website.
One day, at my current job, I was talking to my co-worker about sports blogs and it reminded me about how passionate I was about that blog. That night while drinking a couple of beers, I started to ponder over maybe going to WordPress to create a whole new sports blog. Then I thought to myself, why not start a blog where I can get multiple people involved. So I decided to check to see how much it was to pay for a blog with the capabilities of doing podcasts, videos, and whatever type of form of writing. And when I saw how inexpensive it was and that it was a one-time payment, then I knew I just had to purchase the plan. Later that night I decided to recruit a few people who I knew either from my professional or personal life to put some content up on the blog. Once I had a few people said that they wanted to, I decided to follow through with doing this. Considering I love sports talk and I knew some people who were in the business, I just had to. So that’s how I got to this point and that’s how this blog came to be.
So the point of this blog, while trying to be as professional looking and as great as possible, is to give people a chance to just do it for fun, if they are an aspiring writer, or even if they are already a professional writer and professional broadcaster. Even though I could not pay them, I wanted to pay to be able to get them to get creative with this sports blog so that maybe that this website is a platform for them to showcase their talents and for them to go on to do bigger things. However, I also hope that this could also become something big. If in the future, someone see’s this blog and wants to invest in it to make it into something like 120Sports or even as big as ESPN. Sure it’s a big goal, but dreaming big some times gets people some where.
So that’s the introduction to Rowe Sports Talk Network. Hopefully you enjoy what type of content that is posted by us. I would also like to hear from the readers about suggestions or improvements over what is posted. However, I know from the people I recruited to write on this blog, I hope you the readers are genuinely pleased. Here’s to a great start and here’s to hopefully it becoming big.
Rowe Sports Talk Network 