less is more

There's gonna be some changes around here.

Some lengthy background: For, oh, I'd say about a year and half now, I've been kicking around the idea of retirement.  That accelerated starting early this spring, and about a month ago I made the big decision that This Is It.  Here's how that was gonna go: I would keep on plugging away until around February, and then announce the big goodbye to take effect in the summer; spring sports coverage would've been intermixed with retrospectives like my top ten favorite posts and so on.  I don't like the idea of just abruptly stopping, you see.

The reasons for this might well be obvious to anyone who's been a long-time reader.  I've let all kinds of stuff that I intended to do just fall by the wayside.  I've skipped quite a few days that should've been posting days.  Far too often I've caught myself saying, "oh jeez, I still have to write something today."  And then sometimes I'd be like "screw it, I'll just do it tomorrow."  When it becomes "have to" instead of "really, really want to," that's a sign.  And the fact is, real life is simply catching up, and catching up hard.  From 2008 to 2010 I had a job with insanely nice hours and a 10-minute commute.  From 2010 to 2013 I was either doing nothing at all or going to school.  Now I have a job, more to do outside the job (mostly involving sailing, which is fair to call my passion) and at the same time, less inspiration for ideas, which was always the toughest part of this gig anyway.  Writing has been filling up much too much of my leftover free time.

Naturally, it sort of bummed me out, once I'd made that decision.  I've always been kind of bad at quitting stuff, but, every athlete that's ever retired probably didn't want to stop playing, they just wanted to not play more than they wanted to play, and of course I was going to be conflicted about something like that.  That's how I was thinking about it, and I figured, well, what I will do is, after some period of time, look for a place, not just any place but the right kind of place, where I could write part-time, once a week or so.  And leave this site open as a portal to the game highlights I used to make, which is one of those things that fell completely off the wagon and I wish hadn't.

So that takes you from about 18 months ago to about one month ago.  Further into present day, more like, oh, two hours ago, I had an epiphany: dude, if you only want to write once a week, just write once a week.  It's not like you have to find someone to let you do that.

So that's what I'll do.  Starting at the end of football season (no abrupt stops, remember.  Until the VT game is over, things will go as they have been, as I prefer not to just jump into anything midstream) I'm switching the format of this blog to once a week, on Mondays.  It'll probably be a pretty long post.  I plan on using the whole week to write it, not just sitting down on Mondays and banging it out.  Just type in stuff as it comes to me.  See something I like, spend 15 minutes on it, move on.  See a game, throw a thought onto e-paper, move on.  And then publish the results on Mondays.  It'll probably be less coolly analytical and more about the tao of Virginia, but hell if I know, really.

It means the end, of course, of some regular features.  I doubt I'll do full regular game previews (I might do really big ones like NCAA tournament games....or I might not.)  Probably no more recruit profiles (except that I'll finish up this season's.)  I may actually be able to bring the recruiting board back (another thing that I would've liked to not have dropped.)  I don't think I'll do Senior Seasons anymore.  I really like doing lacrosse bracketology and will probably continue.  I hope this lets me find the time to gin up more highlights, because I'm sitting on a huge passel of games.  And I'll definitely still be doing Cavalier of the Year.

Along these lines, the mic is open for suggestions, specifically about what you'd really miss if I stopped doing it.  Whether I used to do it and stopped, or still do; anything from the game preview graphics to the previews themselves to other team season previews, whatever.  I'll try and work it in if feasible, meaning, if it doesn't turn me back into a semi-daily and if it doesn't turn the actual weekly post into a compilation of repetitive stuff.

I have to admit, I'm rather looking forward to the change - it'll give me more of my life back and let me continue being opinionated on the Internet, minus the annoyance and tiny guilt twinge of having skipped yet another day where someone might've been looking for something they didn't get.  I can put my own hobby back on my own schedule, and hopefully improve the product as well.

P.S. the promised midseason review goes tomorrow.