Lehigh74 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 10, 2023 3:41 pm
Chuck, thanks for your thoughtful and timely recap of the Merrimack game. Always enjoyable to read your write ups. Question: Why do you keep the Lehigh Football Nation site, since you hardly ever post on it anymore?
It's a good question, and at the risk of sounding like an egotist I'd like to explain the history of all of this. It gets a bit technical but I think understandable. And I'll try to keep it short.
Lehigh Football Nation (the blog) was actually started while Pete Lembo was still the head coach, back in 2003. Before then I had worked on early iterations of the site, a hosted solution I was learning about how to do (i.e. I was teaching myself what it took to host a website). And in 2002 I was compiling and resarching material for a book about the 2002 Lehigh season - basically consisting of a lot of printouts of the Morning Call online archives. Nowadays we can get most of that information online from them, but at the time it was the only way I could get it. I think the earliest versions of the hosted site, long since gone, were in 1999 or 2000, but I never got them up consistently and they didn't get the audience.
In that environment www dot blogger dot com came out, and I was an enthusiastic early adopter. It allowed me to get a URL, a place to basically write unlimited length articles, and gave me a voice for "Lehigh Nation" - in my mind, a large, latent number of Lehgh "fans" just waiting to be organized into the right "tribe". This was before Google bought Blogger, and before sports media online had become its own ecosystem. I was not THE first person to invent blogging about a sports team online, but I was around that time.
During that time the main way for fans of a school to interact or pass on information or news was the old Voy boards, and maybe some other small boards. There were ones for the Ivy League and Patriot League, and eventually school-related ones. I discovered them and "wrote" on them, sometimes using it to promote my latest blog posts. In the early aughts the No. 1 message board was called Any Given Saturday and it still exists today. Back in the day I would post often and post links to my work then. This all predated facebook.
Lehigh Football Nation on blogger served me well for many years, but after a while there were content providers interested in me writing I-AA and FCS pieces on a national level, and I did that (College Sporting News, mostly, but also some others that came and went). I never however "gave up" the LFN tribe, and I wrote both. I guess that's because primarily I am a Lehigh fan and that's where my main passion lies.
Fast forward. For years I maintained a presence nationally and kept the Lehigh Football nation blog as a way to communicate to the "tribe" more tailored or Lehigh- or Patriot League-specific stuff. But by now I was running the College Sports Journal, on its own hosting solution, and it's more professional, looks better... than Blogger, which hadn't appreciably changed *all* that much since I started in 2003. I made some decisions to put some of my content (most notably the previews and game summaries) on CSJ. Eventually more and more I was putting more on CSJ and less editorializing type stuff on LFN. Definitely the ones that were more polished and less "opinion", but I've finally also put a polished (but sometimes funny, hopefully) game preview on there too.
LFN however isn't something I can easily "take away" since I use it as a historic record of my writings of the past. Not all of it is great, or even good (I can tell you there's plenty of cringe in there, at least from my perspective or an English teacher's perspective), but it is a historic archive - I've done, for example a bunch of articles on specific Rivalry games I researched (some of which were the foundation of my Rivalry book), and I basically did a running diary of many Lehigh football seasons, complete with partial quotes from coaches, etc. When I finish a book on Andy, I'll be referring to it a lot.
I realize this is a long-winded answer to a simple question, but the TL;DR answer is:
* LFN won't "go away" because I refer to the years of archives,
* Most of my Lehigh writings now are on CSJ,
* Sometimes I will offer my opinions here, and
* Occasionally I could post on LFN "opinion items" if I so choose
IDK if that explains it, but it's an attempt at an explanation as to why it still "is around" but a lot less active. I guess it's somewhat confusing to a casual fan, but it makes some sense in my mind to separate "polished Lehigh football journalism content" (CSJ) and "editorial content from me that the Lehigh Nation "tribe" might want to read (LFN).
