Making good

Waaaaay back when I started on this, one of the things I wanted to do was put up interview transcripts and similar goodies. Unfortunately, those plans fell by the wayside--until now. Today I found the discs with the interview chunks on them, and I am FINALLY going to start transcribing those for you guys to read.

It's been a while (or, gone but not out)

As I alluded to previously, I had my first child last month. This has taken up quite a bit of my time; it has also forced me to adjust my priorities somewhat, and with some mitigating factors coming into play, I am unfortunately not going to be living in the Huntington area past this month. That is not to say I am done with Huntington, and definitely not done with this website. I will continue to work with the material that I've culled thus far, as well as try to make a few excursions to fill in the blanks for the Tri-State League.

In the meantime, if anyone is interested in picking up where I'm (mostly) leaving off, consider this my request for applications for the open position... looking for hockey fans based in the Tri-State area interested in digging deeper into hockey in the Tri-State. Experiences and actual source material you might have in your possession is a plus; I can/will give access to what I have as well.

Beyond that, I will be watching from my perch on the other side of the state. My son's first hockey game will either be a Pens game or a Caps game in all likelihood (or a Johnstown Chiefs game--they're even closer); hopefully I can take him to a game at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in the near future as well.

What the next rush will entail

I've been somewhat dormant (given my recent trends at least)--quite a bit of fill-in work here at the station, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means I don't do as much with this as I'd like. Between this and family visits I won't get a lot of time with this for the next couple weeks, but for you regulars out there, here's what I've got in store:

• After some wrangling with CDs and DVDs, I'm going to FINALLY put up Blizzard-Admirals Game 3 from 2000, that was graciously passed along to me by Mike Holley (preview here).
• Inspired by our latest rumors, I'm going to try and get a hold of some more people involved in the last attempt to land a team at the BSSA. Emphasis there is on "try", but I'm a little more motivated as of late.
• Due to a lost bank card, my NewspaperArchive subscription has lapsed, which unfortunately means that until I can squeeze in a trip to Charleston, my work on the Tri-State League as a whole is a tick stalled. That being said, the Cabell County Library is still just a short jaunt downtown, and my next several trips there will be documenting the Huntington Stars. My wife keeps telling me I should write a book on this all, and if there is a book at this point it will be about the Tri-State League.

If I think of anything else I'll post it here. Just thought I'd let everyone know beforehand in case I can't update this too terribly often.

Whoo links!

I finally discovered the "links" tab on the side there and made some changes to it.

Removed the ads from the page

Too much clutter. I'm gonna keep the little Feedjit widget though, just because I think it's neat.

CONSTRUCTIVE THINGS: well I've been moving, so I've been very constructive, but not necessarily on here (unsurprisingly). To those of you browsing on here, feel free to drop me a line if you've got a blank to fill in (or if you need a blank filled in) on the page :^)

A few general notes

First off, you'll notice a couple new things, don't be alarmed. I've added ads on here, so apologies for the newfound clutter in the name of trying to gather an extra quarter here or there. I also have a little sidebar there that shows who comes here from where. This was something I noticed from a friend of mine who's taken to visualizing her Feedjit display on a map for her art exhibition; I thought "hey, this looks neat, I'll put it on my page".

While I'm working on my attendance geekery, props to perhaps the greatest attendance geek of them all, the one the only Hans Hornstein, who's been keeping track of hockey attendance for over a decade, including the last two seasons of Blizzard hockey.

One thing I'm going to look at with this is something originally done in an academic study in the Journal of Sports Management (yes, such a thing exists!), April 2006 edition, where they plotted out a curve determining how long it would take for attendance of a particular minor league baseball expansion team to drop to an unsustainable level (Those of you who can access it--I'm looking at you, Marshall students out there--can read the whole thing here.)! While such an analysis seems a tick pyrrhic, it could certainly be extrapolated into hockey.

Lastly, a news item that may interest quite a few--the SPHL is in Pensacola with an expansion proposal. Interesting bit is that--and as always feel free to correct me if I'm wrong--this seems to be the first time that an expansion effort has openly courted fan input.