Saying goodbye and thank you to BC Interruption

This year, BC Interruption is celebrating its 10th birthday. Somehow, without even really noticing the milestone creeping up, I’ve been here for 5 of those 10 years.

Our predecessors Brian Favat and Jeff Martyn founded this community on the heels of BC’s unforgettable 2007 football season, and I climbed aboard to bolster hockey coverage after Grant single-handedly covered the run to the 2012 national title. After Brian stepped away from the site to pursue a career in athletics administration at Stanford, I jumped in as managing editor of the site.

Despite the fact that the major revenue sports haven’t given BC fans a lot to cheer about in the last few seasons, steering the ship at BCI has been an incredibly fun and rewarding experience. It’s made following BC athletics feel more intensely personal than it already was to me; it’s helped connect me with friends and fellow alums; and it’s given me a good excuse to spend hours and hours reading about and watching BC sports.

But at the end of next week, I will be stepping away and leaving BCI to the next generation of leadership - hopefully one that will get to write about more wins than losses. (Of course I’m sticking around for wall-to-wall coverage of this weekend’s BC-BU series.)

Blog manager farewells are pretty common on the SBN network, as the nature of the gig makes it hard to do for a long period of time, but usually they come on the heels of some sort of exciting life announcement - new job, new kid, etc. etc.

I don’t have anything exciting like that to share with you. The truth of it is, all of the work that goes in to making this site a reality has been a labor of love for years. The BCI writing staff produces an incredible amount of BC-related content each and every week - about 35 stories a week on average during the season - on top of regular jobs and for somewhere between no money and glorified beer money (like, two nights out in Boston) each month.

This arrangement only works if it’s a labor of love. Over the last few months, it started to finally feel like work. With obligations in my real job increasing, and with the early part of the BC football season becoming another painful one to watch and write about, I started to dread waking up early to get everything set up for the day. It’s not possible to do a good job on a site like this if it feels like work, so the time felt right to step away.

I’m proud of what BC Interruption has accomplished during my time here, and thankful to all the readers - as well as all the writers - who have helped make it the internet’s epicenter of BC sports news. Every month, BCI is one of the top sites in the ACC in blog traffic on the SBN Network, despite BC’s notably small fan/alumni base and the fact that football and basketball haven’t given us too much to be excited about. During an era when blogs have seen declining traffic as conversation moves to Twitter and Facebook, BCI has continued to grow.

In addition to being the site that produces the most content about BC football, basketball and men’s hockey, I’m particularly proud that in the last few years we’ve been able to expand the site’s coverage and shine a spotlight on some of the other great things going on at BC. From women’s hockey’s emergence as a national powerhouse, to the baseball team’s amazing Super Regionals run, to covering BC alums competing in the World Cup and the Olympics, we’ve been able to use our platform to celebrate some of the athletes whose accomplishments aren’t always broadcast on ESPN.

I’m sure I’ve screwed up plenty of times in my years here, whether it be getting a fact wrong or stating an opinion that later proved to be stupid. The nature of a site like this makes you wear a lot of hats at once - fan? reporter? analyst? booster? - and it becomes hard to strike the right balance. I’ve always made it my goal to be unabashed about being a BC fan and supporter, but unafraid to be fair and call things as I see them. I feel like I’ve been able to do that fairly effectively, though we’ve had our share of critics (and they’ve often had a point).

The other goal I’ve had for BCI, which I feel like we’ve usually done a good job with, is finding the right balance between having fun - after all, sports are supposed to be fun - but taking our obligations to the readers seriously. It’s an interesting line to toe; I think BC sports are important enough that they warrant a huge portion of my attention each week, and they’re capable of having a real impact on my week-to-week emotions. As such, they demand and require serious and (when necessary) critical coverage.

But I also try to keep in perspective that these are kids playing games, and unless you have a Penn State or a Baylor situation, nothing that happens in sports actually says anything about the quality of the people at your school, the pride you should have in your education or your experience, or the morality of the people involved.

Sometimes you can take a deep breath and take things a little less seriously. And sometimes you can just sit back and enjoy a moment like BC football snagging that road win at NC State, or BC basketball scoring a dramatic last second victory at MSG, and just enjoy it and be happy for the kids, without worrying about whether BC is ever going to compete with the best in the ACC. You can enjoy something like women’s hockey’s run to the national title game or the soccer team’s run to the elite eight without worrying about whether it’s something you can brag about to the people around the water cooler, or despite the fact that it’s not going to bring any money to the school that will never end up in your hands.

And that’s what we’ve tried to do at BCI for as long as I can remember: toe that line, and find that balance. I think we’ve done it pretty well, and I’m proud to have been a small part in its success.

At the end of the day, the reason why I’ve enjoyed doing this every day is that I like giving BC fans something to share and enjoy - a place to congregate and talk about our shared passion, despite the fact that we’re too small of a group to demand big media attention. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about discussing BC sports here; that’s really what it’s all about to me.

I am leaving the site in good hands. Laura Berestecki will take the reins as managing editor next week and I know she’s going to do a tremendous job. Arthur Bailin and Grant Salzano will be here to narrate the remainder of basketball and hockey season, and the other BCI voices will continue to provide commentary and analysis. We’ve also added some new and younger voices to the mix recently, and I know they will keep this site going for years to come.

I’m not fully going away just yet - you’ll see me pop in from time to time for the rest of this season to cover a game if someone has to miss one, write some hockey bracketology articles, and drop some women’s hockey content - but for the most part, I’ll be fading to the background. Outside of BCI, I’m a member of the alumni council for my class year, and of the Pike’s Peak Hockey Club supporting BC hockey - so BC (and BC athletics) will continue to be a huge part of my life beyond the time I spend watching games or money I spend on tickets.

I consider myself lucky to have people in my life like the entire staff at BCI - Laura, Arthur, Grant, AJ, Coach, Joe P., Hoffses, Tom, Evan, and everyone else who has contributed to the site over the last 5 years. The same goes for the readership. Many of you have become my closest friends. I wouldn’t trade that for anything, even if it meant not having sat through the entirety of Wake Forest 3, BC 0, or that 7-overtime lacrosse game against Syracuse that lost us the #OrangeEagle trophy in 2015.

It’s been fun, y’all. Thanks for everything.