A Special Anniversary

You may not know this, but today marks a special day in the history of Big Apple Buckets. It’s the site’s one-year anniversary.

During the season I’ve tried to look back at the opening post that set the vision for what the site would be. I’ve also tried to push forward with some new ideas. I’ve had mixed success with both.

Goals and limitations define a site, especially a site like this that is run almost exclusively during (and takes up most of) my free time. I love college basketball. I love numbers. There’s honestly nothing I would rather be doing on a Saturday afternoon in early March than analyzing NIT bracket possibilities. (Some people think that makes me crazy.) I hope that shows in what you find here on the site. Over the past year there have been more than 62,000 page views, so hopefully someone is finding something useful. But I don’t want to dwell in the past. Let’s look towards the future.

As I’ve moved forward I’ve identified eight schools for which I can and want to deliver the best coverage possible: LIU Brooklyn, Wagner, St. Francis (NY), Columbia, Manhattan, Iona, Fordham, and Hofstra. Most of this is due to a limitation, I’m Manhattan and public transportation based. To fans of other schools, namely Stony Brook, NJIT and St. Peter’s, you’ll continue to find coverage of your league and I’ll certainly write about those schools where appropriate, but I can’t promise the same coverage. That said, if you’re an aspiring journalist living on Long Island or in New Jersey and want a place to showcase your work, I’d love to hear from you. It’d be great to get more voices on the site.

What will the coverage for those eight schools look like moving forward? Well, I’m not going to replace what you get from Sean Brennan, Cormac Gordon or Kieran Darcy. I don’t intend to either. I want to supplement their coverage with insightful, analytical writing on issues for each of those schools. Yes, I’ll write game stories sometimes, but my hope is to be more like CBS where they take on a larger narrative or to help an underserved market (which includes many of the schools this blog covers actually).

I also have two bigger goals moving forward:

1. I want to tell more longer-form stories.
2. I want to do a better job of bringing communities together.

If I was grading myself for Year 1 I’d probably give it a B. There are some pieces of writing on the site that I’m really proud of. I’ve also developed some fun tools that do useful analysis (Assist Tracker, Season and Tournament Simulator, and Team Similarities are good examples). The page views started to come in February and March. I made great contacts. What I didn’t do is tell all the stories I want to tell. NYC hoops is full of interesting stories from a personal, fan, and team level. Capturing those is important. I need to do more of it.

Secondly, there’s a community here. Otherwise what would be the point of the site? But it is fractured. I think there are ways to bring it together and I hope to start introducing those in the months leading up to October 2012 when it starts all over again.

This offseason I intend to focus on what most college basketball sites focus on during the offseason, coaching moves, the NBA Draft (with player similarities again), scheduling and recruiting. It’s also a great time though to take up a new project or two. If you’ve got an analytical question you want answered let me know in the comments, maybe there’s a way to solve it.

Thanks everyone for reading.