I Open at the Close: While We’re Waiting…

Happy Thursday, Blawg Pound and loyal readers of WFNY! You’ll have to forgive me for breaking with my typical conversational decorum for this, my final edition of While We’re Waiting. It too will be my final article as a regular contributor of the Waiting For Next Year crüe. This may come as a shock to my fellow staff for they did not receive any prior indication from yours truly and are learning of this at the same time as you readers are. I struggled a bit thinking about the title of my farewell speech, so I went to an old standby, somehow tying it into Harry Potter. So, let’s talk a little about the how, when, and why that’s led me to this point.

I was a very different person when co-founder Rick Grayshock reached out to me in the spring of 2011, just as I was finishing up my degree at Ohio State, to join Waiting For Next Year. I had been blogging in some capacity on my own for nearly four years, starting on a modified MySpace page that I called “Cleveland Sports Blog”, then eventually purchasing a domain name, CurseOfCleveland.com, and joining the Bloguin network. Two of my close friends, J.V. and Kyle, were sources of constant encouragement, and I would have never gotten the thing off the ground without their help. When LeBron left in the summer of 2010, my sportswriting soul was crushed. I just didn’t have #twtw (in this case, the will to write) anymore, and I shut down my own site.

I continued to remain active on Twitter, and I eventually spent a brief time at former WFNY colleague, SLAM Magazine contributor, and all-around-nice-guy Brendan Bowers’s site, Stepien Rules. From there, a few short months later, I caught the eye of the WFNY triumvirate, and I started during the Big Ten Conference Tournament in March 2011.

WFNY is also a very different entity since I joined up. When I began, there were no podcasts, no Behind The Box Score, no Cavalier film rooms, Rick did WWW almost exclusively, email chains rather than Slack was the way we communicated and collaborated, we had assigned weekend editors, and the cast was far different than it is today. The teams were different too. The Cavs had yet to draft Kyrie Irving and Tristan Thompson and were in the painful teardown aftermath of the first LBJ era. The Tribe was in the middle of middling #Actaball. The Buckeyes had just suspended Jim Tressel and would dismiss him two months later. The Browns…. well, not everything was different.

From the beginning, I’ve never shied away from being passionate in my (hopefully) well-formed opinions and observations, in my interactions with readers, commenters, followers, and peers, and in my craft. The responsibility of being a WFNY contributor is something I never took lightly. I don’t know if the WFNY gang will ever know how much of a tremendous source of pride being a part of this journey for four and a half years has been. They’ll probably never fully understand just how much it meant to me to be able to share a bit of me with all of you.

With that passion, however, came frustration, anger, disagreements and dust-ups over time. That includes internally. While I want to make it clear that I am leaving on my own terms and without any influence from above, it would be dishonest to say that some creative differences and ownership decisions were not contributing factors to my decision to step away from an active role at WFNY at this time.

I’ve struggled with this decision and have thought about it a lot over the past few weeks, but I’ve simply come to the conclusion that it is time. I’ve seen Rick, TD, Jon, Jacob (a couple of times), Bowers, Brendan Porath, and many others either hang them up for other ventures or move on for personal or professional reasons. Nothing lasts forever. I never thought about how long I would be doing this when I started blogging in my college dorm room at 18 years old, and my only goal was to see it through until there was a Cleveland sports championship.

And that was ultimately the one question I dwelled on for some time: Am I at peace with not being an active part of WFNY should Next Year finally be the year that the drought ends?

I’ve let go of pieces of my involvement a little bit a time. First, it was deciding to focus almost solely on basketball. This past spring, I went without tweeting for nearly two months. Following the end of the Cavs’ run, I’ve taken a few weeks without writing much of anything. I’ve always been of the belief that nothing is worth doing half-assed, so I wanted to make this decision in the basketball offseason rather than slowly fading into the background without letting the site owners know exactly where I stand and giving them time to fill my place. I owe Scott, Andrew, Craig, and company at least that and so much more. I can sleep well knowing that I went out writing full-blast during this playoff run with more film rooms than I did all regular season. It makes it easier to step away knowing there is a stable of writers willing and able to cover the Cavs as well.

Some of this decision was about taking some time out and going back to the simpler days for me. I could be a fan and say angry or silly things without thinking about what the “WFNY-“ in front of my twitter handle portrayed. I miss being able to be pessimistic short-term yet optimistic long-term, a dabbler and fan of advanced stats without being a slave to them, and I miss not caring about a lot of what Twitter and TV personalities and sports bloggers try to get you to care about. Maybe Trevor Bauer said it best yesterday.

Still, I enjoy writing too much to give it up cold turkey, but I am content with ending my time in the high-profile blogging game for now. So, what’s next? First, I have switched my Twitter handle to @TeedUpKirk. This handle has multiple meanings for me. First, I love (attempting to play the game of) golf. Second, I have both received and issued technical fouls in my basketball lifetime as a player and official, and it’s a nod to my propensity to get heated at times watching and analyzing the game that I love. Will this be the last time you see my name on the WFNY site? Perhaps not. I truly can call many of my colleagues at WFNY friends, and maybe a time will come in the future when circumstances change. When the itch is there, I have the avenues to scratch it as I still own CurseofCleveland.com and may populate that from time to time.

The memories, however, are umpteen. Personally, from constructing Finals film rooms to the #TankStrong movement to NBA Draft Lotteries and picks to #ColumbusIsNotCleveland to #LOBOB to Uni Talk to my time as a weekend warrior to 2am Behind The Box Scores to Buckeye basketball to countless laughs on the #giphy and #random channels of Slack (I may miss #coffeegirl most of all). The WFNY crucible undeniably made me a better writer. Being exposed to all angles of how a large operation like this runs and how ideas are generated and nurtured has been a true pleasure. Reading the work of many of my fellow colleagues has made me laugh, think, cry, question, reconsider, and believe. I’ll now primarily go back to what I was prior to March 2011, a reader and a fan of the work done on these pages.

At the end of the day, I hope through it all that my work was worth reading and the journey was worth sharing. I know that the reciprocal was certainly true. It was thoroughly worth all of the time and effort, and I’d get on the ride and answer the call from Rick all over again.

I’ll see you all at the parade.