Introducing the Pioneer Post

[NOTE: My season preview blog post will follow later today. This post is just a general, navel-gazing intro to The Pioneer Post and my plans for it, such as they are.]

The first thing to understand about this DU basketball blog project — which I’m officially launching today, right now, with this post — is that, really, I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing.

I mean: sure, I’ve been a college hoops fan for two decades — since March 22, 1990, to be exact. And sure, I’ve been blogging since 2002 (getting my 15 minutes of fame in 2005). And sure, I blog about sports all the time (indeed, I basically give over the blog completely to college basketball every March, the most intense of the “Many Seasons of Brendan“). And sure, I’m an “recovering journalist,” as my Twitter profile puts it, with a print journalism degree from USC Annenberg.

But, even so: me, doing bona fine, real reporting on a basketball team? Getting credentialed? Interviewing the coach and players? Writing up the games? This is an entirely new, crazy idea.

It crazy partly because I have a day job as an attorney, but also partly because it’s well outside of even my old journalistic comfort zone. The one and only section I never wrote for during my time at the Daily Trojan was the Sports section. And if you haven’t noticed, in my blog-coverage, I tend to veer toward the nerdy aspects of sports — bubbles, brackets and the BCS, oh my! — as well as historical happenings, unlikely hypothetical scenarios, and so forth. What I tend not to focus on so much is the, y’know, sports part of sports. The athletic particulars. The in-game strategies. The Xs and Os.

Which brings up a valid, reasonable question: What the heck am I doing, starting a basketball blog?

The answer lies in my conversion last February and March to a full-on acolyte of Kyle Whelliston, the iconoclastic, traveling mid-major guru who I’d read since 2004 and met in 2006, but had come, over the years, to follow only occasionally and loosely. Last season, that all changed, as I got caught up in Kyle’s crazy world of mid-major obsessives — culminating in this epic blog post about Kyle, his Mid-Majority, Butler and Fate — and I eventually found myself venturing into The Mid-Majority’s archives, looking for new material to get engrossed in. That’s how, several months late, I came across Kyle’s November 4, 2009, essay, “Emotional Investments.” (Warning: sexual reference ahead.)

There’s no reason to be anything but straight-up about this. Bandwagoning is the sports equivalent like rubbing one out in an airport bathroom stall. It doesn’t compare to a hot, wet, sloppy lovemaking session with someone you’ve had your eye on for years. I’ve lived every minute and game of five world championship seasons in three major American sports, so let me tell you all about the difference.

In matters of life, love, or money, no yield is ever guaranteed. But with spectator sports, you get out what you put in, and that’s bankable truth. The amount of time you spend on the thrillcoaster will parallel the size of your payoff. It’ll determine the depth of your feeling. And isn’t that why we do this, for the feeling? …

The NCAA Tournament is a time when a lot of folks go “underdog shopping.” They’re looking for the next best out-of-nowhere story, the team most likely to spring the 15-over-2 upset. They want to know who the “next George Mason” is, and who has the weirdest and most lovable mascot. They want to cherry-pick their way into a big sports experience.

I fully accept that some folks treat us at TMM as one-dimensional extras in their consumer sports lives. I know they’re looking for something to do before baseball season and will disappear as quickly as they arrived. And while I don’t like being the friendly Green Grocer who helpfully recommends fresh Bulldog over out-of-season Wildcat, I’ve grown to tolerate it. I politely answer as many questions as I can, based on what I’ve seen in my extensive travels around Hoops Nation.

But I keep reminding myself of this: those who adopt-and-abandon will be left empty. Even if that cute underpuppy that they rented at the Mid-Majority ‘Dog Pound wins a game or two, those come-latelies will never feel the same overwhelming emotions that students, alumni and true fans will. An afternoon of internet research in a cubicle can’t possibly measure up to months and years of hoping and wishing; buying a last-minute t-shirt will never replace the investment of sitting through October exhibition games and hanging on every possession.

I mention all of this now, as the autumn leaves swirl in November, because this cycle will repeat itself all over again. It always does. Spring’s flowers will bloom in March, and they’ll be back.

But now, right here, this is the time to get on the ride.

Because if you don’t ride the whole ride, you won’t get the full high.

You might be an alumnus of one of the 251 colleges and universities below the Red Line. You might even be attending one now, and living in that pleasant time-window before the student loan bills start coming. If you didn’t go to a small college, or if you didn’t go to college at all, it doesn’t matter — you can still join in. But this — right now — is the time to jump on board, when the slate is clean and opportunities seem boundless. Even if you’ve never heard of these schools and don’t know where they are, this is the time to adopt. Choose your allegiance now, and definitely not later.

As an alumnus of USC and Notre Dame (both distinctly not “universities below the Red Line“) and a long-time fan of Gonzaga (one of Kyle’s three “exceptions“), I recognized that none of “my teams” qualified as official members of “Hoops Nation.” So I liked the notion of “adopting” a team, specifically a local team I can actually follow closely, whose mid-majordom bears the TMM Stamp of Approval. Unfortunately, because I didn’t discover the essay until sometime in February or March, it was too late to take the step it recommended: to create a “Certificate of Emotional Investment” for 2009-10. But I started thinking ahead to 2010-11, and I decided, right then and there, that I would “adopt” the University of Denver Pioneers as my “emotional investment,” my mid-major team to follow from beginning to end.

And then it occurred to me: I could do more than “follow” the Pioneers. I could do better than just creating and printing some dinky certificate (which Kyle decided not to bring back for 2010 anyway) and then cheering for the team, as a fan. I have a blog, I thought to myself. I have a journalism degree. I can cover the Pioneers. I can make this a winter project, start a new blog all about DU hoops. (Technically, it’s a category within my regular blog, but it displays like its own blog when you access the category page. And I’ve given it a subdomain all to itself.)

So, late in the summer, I got in touch with the Sports Information Director for basketball, Mike Kennedy — himself a big Whelliston fan, as it turns out — and explained what I was doing. Mike graciously and enthusiastically agreed to grant me full media access despite the somewhat unorthodox nature of this project: an erstwhile journalist, now a lawyer with a blogging habit, deciding to randomly devote a sizable portion of his free time and energy and blog space to covering Pioneer basketball, having never “covered” sports in this fashion before. I have a press pass, a spot on the press-release e-mail list; access to practices, to the players and coaches, to the press box, etc.; and probably a seat at the courtside media table, at least for non-TV games. I’ve been to a couple of practices already, interviewed the coach and the captain, participated in several press conferences and media-only teleconferences, and generally done whatever I can, within my time constraints, to get an early feel for the team and its prospects. (I’ll have more to say about those prospects in a separate blog post a bit later today.)

But the question remains: What exactly am I going to do with this blog? Will it be a first-person account of the season by a fan who has made an “emotional investment” in the team? Will it be a third-person account by a reporter, based on standard neutral journalistic principles? Will it be a combination of the two? And anyway, what, exactly, is my focus? Xs and Os, which I don’t entirely understand? The storylines surrounding the team and the school? What can I bring to the table in covering DU that’s different from what other media outlets already provide? How can I ensure this blog won’t suck? Honestly, I’m playing all of this by ear. You’ll discover along with me how it evolves.

Anyway, that’s enough for my navel-gazing introductory post. I would say more, but I’m getting awfully sleepy as I write this, and I fear I am beginning to lapse into incoherence! Saved for another navel-gazing post: explaining what’s going on with DU BALLZ, pictured at right. But first!! Later today (Friday), hopefully before the season-opening game vs. UC Santa Barbara tips off in Oregon at 5:30 PM Mountain Time, I will publish my season preview post. Also coming at some point, though perhaps not until the weekend because of time constraints, a post about Thursday’s big WAC announcement. Stay tuned! And welcome to the new blog!

UPDATE: Due to a name duplication issue, I’ve renamed the blog “Pioneer Pulse.”