My reflection: Thank you

My family didn’t subscribe to the Green Bay Press-Gazette or Milwaukee Journal Sentinel when I was a kid.

However, I rarely missed reading a sports section that either of the newspapers produced because those ended up being delivered to our house on a regular basis anyway.

Sorry, let me rephrase that.

The sports sections were delivered to our milk house on a regular basis.

For those not familiar with farming terminology, the milk house is the building where – as the name would suggest – milk is housed in a bulk tank until it’s trucked to a processing plant.

It was also the gathering spot for our milk truck driver and my dad to discuss all the local news items from the area, like who was the first one in the fields for spring planting or who bought a new piece of machinery for their farm.

I was never much of a talker during those chats.

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Given how I had trained the family dog to run a 10-yard hitch route and turn around on a dime to catch a football, my dad knew I was more interested in talking about football than farming at a young age.

That’s why I think he eventually got our milk truck driver to start delivering his sports sections on his stops.

It didn’t matter that they were a day or two old by the time I got my hands on them, I read every inch of those pages.

They were a real treat for me, especially in a time before all that information was just a few clicks away on a computer.

It’s where I began to become familiar with the bylines of all of the beat writers for the Green Bay Packers. I marveled at their prose and thought what they were doing was so cool.

Sadly, it took me several years before I truly appreciated and marveled at the work my dad was doing each day on the farm. He definitely succeeded in instilling his work ethic in me.

That’s part of the story of how I ended up pursuing a career as a sportswriter.

I started this website because I didn’t want my days in that profession to be over. Quite honestly, I want to figure out a way to change it on a local level to ensure it thrives for future generations to enjoy.

Deep down, I have a farmer’s heart and want to see things grow.

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I don’t know if I’ll ever accomplish my goal, but I feel I’m headed down the right path to doing that.

At the very least, it was a real treat to see words of encouragement from some of the best writers in the business show up on my Twitter feed in recent weeks.

I can’t thank Pete Dougherty, Jason Wilde and Bob McGinn enough for sharing this on their feeds, especially at the risk of alienating all of their followers who only expect to see Packers, Packers and more Packers from their Twitter accounts.

Packers coverage is great and all, but I would still hope in today’s digital age that there is a place to use more resources on high school sports coverage.

I’m one month into my adventure with this website. I’ve procured $76 and two hamburgers from the venture so far.

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I’m amazed at the web traffic it has seen because I honestly wasn’t expecting that. The site is averaging 1,131 page views per article and will surpass 50,000 page views this week. That might be a small number to some, but not to me. Thank you.

However, the “metrics” that mean the most to me have nothing to do with “clicks.”

After all, you can’t measure heart. I know high school athletes have plenty of that.

For me, it’s about making connections with coaches and players, like giving over 50 players an opportunity to be interviewed during my preseason trips to 15 different teams.

I wasn’t planning to make that many visits this year, but I wanted to do as much as I possibly could once I got started.

My new 9-5 job wasn’t going to be an excuse not to do it in my eyes. I was going to find a way to make it work.

That’s why I was at De Pere before 6 a.m. one Friday when it had practice early in advance of its golf fundraiser.

I made a similar trek to N.E.W. Lutheran one morning. I then drove back down I-43 to the next county to go to work and returned to Green Bay that afternoon to catch Notre Dame’s practice.

I had gone to the practices for all the other Brown County schools up to that point and wanted to make sure I got to them all.

Notre Dame senior Max Pallini treated me with some of the best words I could have heard that day.

“We always looked forward to seeing you write about us in the paper. On behalf of all the high school athletes, thank you for covering us,” Pallini said.

I’m not a big subscriber on making fancy proclamations or anything of the sort, but I want you to know I’m putting everything I possibly can into making this work for the long haul.

I’ll run my tank dry before I quit trying.