First, I don't want to put the cart before the horse, but... if the folks who have tentatively committed to support the site with pledges and sponsorships follow through, I will have enough help to hire Joey Dwyer to work for us for the next 12 months starting in August. Joey will not only be helping out with hoops and be our lead guy there, but is going to be with me for home football games and some media opportunities there, and also help more with baseball in the coming year. The 12-month-funding was key because Joey otherwise goes home in the summer and as you know was unable to help with any postseason coverage, which suffered at times last year because I had stuff I had to do and we had no backup plan.
So thank you to all those who have promised to help because you have truly helped us up our coverage there significantly.
The next step--and he has given me permission to throw this out there, because I told him it might help with funding--is to hire Billy Derrick. Billy would also help us with all three sports and also help us with a lot of our video and podcasting needs.
If we are able to fund the addition of Billy on a part-time basis, this is what we would do:
- We would have a three-person crew to cover football games.
- We would launch a two-hour YouTube-based postgame show after games featuring the three of us, probably Luke Wyatt also and perhaps Chip Fridrich.
- We would likely add post-game YouTube shows (we'll take questions in chat) for hoops and baseball. I am not entirely sure what they'll look like, but most likely it would be after big weekend games during conference play, postseason, and marquee out-of-conference games. (For lesser games, Joey will continue to do the videos he's done, they just won't be as fully-formed as a post-game show.)
- We will expand our podcasting efforts on the whole. For football, we'll upload the postgame as an audio file, probably due a Tuesday update after Clark Lea's presser, I'll probably do a mid-week episode with Luke like I do now, and then I would put Billy in charge of doing a pre-game show which he'll probably take the lead on. We'll probably have Andrew Allegretta and Kevin Ingram on on a rotating basis, maybe throw in a quick recruiting update, get on a beat writer from another school, etc.
- We may also do an extra episode during football season for a non-football sport--that's probably Joey and Billy talking about the upcoming hoops season (or games being played while football is going, etc.)
- During basketball, we'd do a new episode after every big game and who knows, maybe even try to do three episodes during hoops and baseball seasons.
Adding Billy would help us A TON. What that would do would allow all three of us to cover football. Then when hoops starts, we'll peel Joey off football a bit to let him focus more on hoops. When football's done, Billy and Joey would hit that really hard. I'll be a part of hoops some but it'll give me a much-needed break, which I'll especially need when spring practice and baseball are going at the same time. When baseball starts, I'd peel Billy off hoops a little to have him help me there. And when hoops is over, it'd be all three of us covering baseball. And both of them would help me with spring and fall practice.
The other thing I would like help with is a travel budget. We'd like to send Billy and Joey to the Wake game, maybe to the UNLV game, and maybe an SEC trip or two. We'd love to have a budget for Hoover and Omaha, or some additional baseball trips, or hoops trips, or whatever people have the appetite to fund.
So if you are interested in helping fund this, please contact Luke or me. Thanks again to those who have reached out, and if we can do a little more, I'm confident in saying the coverage we'll be able to deliver will never be better.
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