Thank You, NbN

Life’s really not fair, man. I mean what an unbelievable couple of months. What a ridiculous, confusing, maddening, twisted couple of months. As a baseball player, I feel for all my fellow spring athletes who had their seasons taken from them because of these terrible circumstances. I, like many other seniors, never got a chance to take the field knowing that I’d be playing my final game. We never got to play the senior season that you train your entire life for. It sucks. It really, really sucks. Words can’t describe the emotions we all feel and that’s not what I intend to do here. Instead I’d like to take this opportunity to reflect a bit on my amazing time at Bates and at Nothing But NESCAC.

There are several people from NbN that I’d like to give a huge thanks to right off the bat: first of all, Joe and Adam for creating the site all the way back in 2015. What those guys were able to do was incredible and the fact that the site is alive and well several years after their graduation is a testament to all of their hard work and dedication. I’d like to thank Pete Lindholm who was the editor-in-chief when I started writing for NbN, because he allowed me to dip my feet in the water and as I got more comfortable he gave me more to write. Pete is a huge reason that I was able to have the success that I did as a writer and I often attempted to mimic his voice in my early writings as I was still establishing an identity. I want to thank Colby Morris who, in addition to being a hell of a pitcher, is also a hell of a sports writer and who helped train me on how to take over the site. He definitely kept me grounded at times when I needed it and I appreciate him not getting too fed up with me when I made some mistakes in the early going. 

Another big thank you goes to Matt Karpowicz who I would argue was the best big man in NESCAC hoops during my four years and who has some of the hottest NESCAC sports takes you’ll ever hear. I owe big thank you’s to Haven Cutko and my baseball teammate Ryan Moralejo who were always willing to write an article whenever it needed to be done, even at the very last minute. Those guys are both excellent writers and they were huge parts of the NbN staff this year. My roommates at Bates – Nolan Collins, Jack Arend, and Jon Lindgren – sat on the couch with me as I wrote every single article, pitching ideas and offering suggestions. I love those three guys to death and I absolutely would not be where I am today without them. 

Lastly I’d like to thank the people who make Nothing But NESCAC possible – the players, coaches, administrators, fans, and everyone who follows the site. Knowing that people pay attention to what we say is a bit scary at times, but it’s a lot of fun. Hearing from players or coaches that they like what we’re doing is the best feeling and it makes all the long nights, extensive research, and awkward conversations 100% worth it. We even started to interact on social media with the athletic departments of some of the schools, and that was a really cool validation of what we were doing.

I first heard about Nothing But NESCAC on my overnight recruiting visit to Bates because they had recently released a NESCAC fantasy football draft in the early days of the site and the baseball players at Bates were buzzing about it. As a high school student at the time, following the site gave me a way to stay invested in NESCAC sports when I was on the outside. I continued to follow NbN as a freshman at Bates and towards the end of the year I finally decided I wanted to get involved. I started off the 2017 football season slow, but once the 2017-2018 basketball season rolled around I became a full-time contributor and really established my voice as a writer. Ultimately, Pete recognized my passion and genuine interest in what we were doing so he allowed me to help take over the site the following year. 

One of the things that I always pushed for from the day I started at NbN was to add some sort of podcast. I thought this would be a really cool way to put us onto another platform and make it even more interactive. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get around to that until the short weekly interview series I did with the men’s basketball player of the week this year. I wish I had a chance to put some more time into that and get a bit more creative with it, but being a full-time college student with an athletic schedule to worry about forced me to put it to the side at times.

Nothing But NESCAC has given me the chance to explore a side of myself that I never even knew was there. Before college I never considered myself much of a writer, but I had a passion for sports and I had read enough NbN articles to at least be able to mimic the way they wrote. As I wrote more I began to get more comfortable, and started to realize that I had a knack for this. I was able to expand my writing beyond game recaps and analyses, trying my hand at pure entertainment for a change. This led me to produce what ended up being my all time most-viewed article, the 2019 NESCAC Baseball All-Roster Pic Team. NbN gave me a chance to meet people I would never have met and try things I would never have tried and for that I will always be thankful.

Being on this side of things is funny – I sometimes found myself confused about why people were getting upset over the opinions of a bunch of college kids. If someone ever took issue with something we said it meant that people were paying attention and that was what we wanted, right? Learning that your words carry weight is not an easy task for a college student and that was definitely one of my biggest takeaways from running the site. There were also times when I felt pressure to get an article out on time because I knew there were people waiting to read what we had to say this week. Nothing But NESCAC might not be ESPN, but there were definitely expectations that people had and it turned out that recruiting writers and regularly publishing articles was a bit harder than I made it out to be.

In the end, Nothing But NESCAC became one of the greatest sources of pride and accomplishment for me during my time at Bates. It’s hard right now amidst the chaos to really reflect on the last four years and how they’ve impacted us. In a way, the year ending like this resembles the end of an athletic season. Sports have a deceitful way of collapsing down to one game or one moment, and that’s certainly what this year has felt like. When we look back on our seasons and careers, we won’t remember the arrant throw or the missed shot that affected one game. What we’ll remember is the time we spent with our teammates; the long bus rides, the hours in the locker room, the grueling conditioning sessions. When we reflect back on the (almost) four years spent at our respective colleges it won’t be about how the coronavirus cut short our senior year. It’ll be about all the good; the relationships formed and experiences had during the time we actually were there.

The NESCAC likes to think of itself as special when it comes to the way they operate. Often times we resent the restrictions they arbitrarily place on the number of games and out-of-season practices, and rightfully so. Some of the rules that the conference has in place only feel like they exist so that NESCAC schools can maintain a sort of self-righteousness. These 11 schools like to think that they’re better than their peer schools, and in many respects they are. But let’s not forget, however, that Williams recently put $22 million into their football field, Middlebury poured $46 million into a new fieldhouse, and Colby broke ground on a new $200 million athletic complex, among others. There’s a reason NESCAC schools so frequently compete for national championships, and it’s certainly not because they have a superior balance between academics and athletics.

That being said, NESCAC sports are special. They aren’t necessarily special for the reasons that the administrators believe, but they truly are. Getting a world class education while competing for a national championship is something that very few people get to experience in their lifetime. Having a real college experience while still playing your sport at a very high level is a really awesome thing and shouldn’t be taken for granted. The NESCAC may be shifting towards the rest of the NCAA more than it would like to think, but it still is a bit of an enclave when it comes to the way they handle athletics on campus. It will always have a special place in my heart.