Man, I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since I started writing on www.thestatmanspeaks.com. My first article on July 17, 2011, was about high school football. See, I was a high school football statistician for games on the radio (1997 to 2015) and for games on the television (2009 to 2015). I really fell in love with writing when I was in high school (1991 to 1995) as one of my electives was Creative Writing, taught by an awesome teacher named Beverly Hoag. I have tried to reach her on email, but no reply as of yet.
Unfortunately, after high school, and up until 2011, I had a lot of other things going on in my life and I forgot about writing! Then, in 2011, I jumped on the internet bandwagon and almost immediately, I came up with the name of thestatmanspeaks.com. It tells you who I am; THE STATMAN. Then it tells you what I do; SPEAKS. But, the speaks part actually means, I speak in words not audio!
I had no game plan when I started. I just wanted to write about the games I worked, include some stats, and a few pictures. One thing I did with the pictures is I put a watermark on all of them for self promotion for when they were shared. It always made very happy when my photos would get shared by the players themselves; they liked seeing themselves in action. To this day, I still see some of my pictures being shared on the internet.
My writing definitely improved throughout the years, I was also gaining more readers and followers on Twitter, and I found myself enjoying writing a lot more than being a statistician. So, I retired as high school football statistician and became a freelance sports writer and photographer in 2015, 2016, and 2017. I had articles published on www.sasports.com, www.texashsfootball.com, www.texasredzonerport.com, and www.thestatmanspeaks.com. I had renovation photos of a historic 73 year old football stadium featured on television, a book, and several websites. Those renovation photos even got me interviewed on television. I continued with renovation photos of another football stadium and new construction photos of a gymnasium for one of the largest school districts in the state of Texas.
I was even contracted by St. Anthony Catholic high school to cover their football team in 2016. The then Principal remembered me and my writings from when I covered some of their basketball games in 2013. The head coach of the basketball team back then was Kevin Smisek and in 2016, he became the head football coach. So, we already had a history of working together. So, how did I switch from high school football to high school basketball in 2013?
Well, I will tell you…
I promoted all of my articles on Facebook, Twitter, and also the San Antonio Express News (I commented on the High School football articles they provided and provided my website). I wasn’t trying to be better than them by overtly self promoting my website. I just wanted people to know that I existed and my style of writing is much different than that of a journalist. I know people read the comments but I never expected to be contacted by anybody. So yeah, I was really surprised when I received a Tweet on July 28, 2012 from Kevin Smisek, the Head Coach of the St. Anthony Yellow Jackets basketball team. I had only been on Twitter for 13 days and was still trying to understand how it all worked.
My initial reply to Coach Smisek was, “I am not planning on doing a hoops blog.” Football season was just a month away from starting and I knew that would take over my website for 4 months. Two days later (after my brain had time to think), I told Coach Smisek, “Let me get thru football season and then I will think of doing a hoops blog.” I finally made up my beautiful mind to cover the basketball team on December 3rd (while I was on vacation and unplugged from the world). So, I wrote some high school basketball articles for St. Anthony in 2013, 2014, and 2016. One of the players on the 2016 St. Anthony team was a freshman named Charles Bassey, who was 6’10! I am not joking. I had to see him for myself. Don’t be surprised if you hear his name being called at the 2021 NBA Draft!
Even though I don’t provide a lot of new articles anymore on www.thestatmanspeaks.com, I still do continue to write, but it’s on www.thedadspeaks.com. I am a husband and a dad and that is where my priorities lie these days.
Oh, I did do some writing very recently for www.texasredzonereport.com about the NFL.
