HUDSON VALLEY LOCAL NEWS
A heartfelt thank you, a gracious welcome
First things first: a heartfelt thank you and a gracious welcome.
Thank you for clicking and coming to Hudson Valley Sports Report. According to the brainiacs who track these sort of things, there are more than 109 million websites and more than 25 billion pages on the world wide web. To say you have choices would be the understatement of the millennium, so thank you for checking us out.
And welcome to what we hope will become the go-to site for Hudson Valley sports fans.
For those of you who don’t know me or remember me, my name is Rich Thomaselli. I’ve been a sportswriter for more than 23 years, the first 10-plus of which were spent right here in the area covering sports for the Poughkeepsie Journal from 1986-96. The rest of the bio you can read here.
My mission for this site is simple: to provide the area with comprehensive coverage of high school, college, pro and amateur sports in the Hudson Valley. I’d like people to think of it as a daily morning sports page. In fact, I hope to design each page to look something like a newspaper page that you hold in your hand each morning.
Or used to, anyway.
My motivation in starting this site came from multiple sources, one of which is the shifting preferences of younger readers to get their news from new media (web sites, blogs, Twitter) instead of traditional media like newspapers, magazines and television.
Another reason is that the newspaper industry is in a state of chaos all over the country, and it’s affecting the way everything is covered, not just sports. It’s been a vicious domino effect – a tremendous decrease in advertising has meant a loss in revenue, which has resulted in layoffs of staff and an ever-shrinking newshole.
So, when you don’t have the people to cover events or the space to write them up, everybody suffers, especially the community.
This has happened locally and, to be blunt, it stinks.
In doing research and due diligence since January for the creation of this site, I’ve talked to more than 100 high school and college coaches and athletic directors. They all had the same frustrations – during the regular season, when there can be upward of two dozen high school games and a dozen college games to be called in and reported each night, two things happen. And neither is good.
One, because of printing press schedules and deadlines, games must be called in by 8 or 9 p.m. When you’re playing a basketball game that’s scheduled to start at 7:30, and sometimes doesn’t start until later if the jayvee game runs over, well, you do the math. That game isn’t getting in.
Two, even when coaches do manage to get a game called in, they find the next morning that there’s only a line or two in the paper. Again, the result of trying to fit a square peg (numerous games) into a round hole (lack of space).
And one of the industry-wide problems plaguing many newspapers is that they haven’t figured out a way to monetize their website to enhance the print product. So in many cases, what you see in your hard copy newspaper is what you see on the website.
I hope Hudson Valley Sports Report gives coaches and players more of what they’re looking for.
Now, let’s get the 800-pound gorilla out of the room. Yes, I used to work for the Poughkeepsie Journal. Yes, the Poughkeepsie Journal is competition for Hudson Valley Sports Report, as is the Kingston Daily Freeman, and vice-versa. No, this is NOT an indictment of the Journal or the Freeman. These are papers that have fallen victim to the problems that plague the industry as a whole. My heart breaks for what has happened to the industry, especially for my former colleagues at the Ann Arbor (Mich.) News – a 174-year old paper that was forced to fold last week.
But I believe in the importance of the press and I believe journalism to be a noble profession. So Hudson Valley Sports Report was designed and created to provide another media outlet and further coverage for the area’s sports teams.
The site is still in its infancy, and there will be growing pains, to be sure. Down the road, we’ll add more interactive features and video. But for now, as far as this site goes, I’m very much the new guy on the block. It will take a while for Hudson Valley Sports Report to ingratiate itself into the community, for coaches and administrators of all sports and recreation leagues to get used to calling in games and sending us results.
I was born and raised in Beacon, have lived in either Dutchess or Ulster counties for 37 of my 45 years, and worked at the Journal for nearly 11 years. I am more than familiar with the area, with all the high school and college teams, and with the great history of sports our little neck of the woods has. I am proud to be back – for good – and even prouder to start Hudson Valley Sports Report.
So I humbly ask you to reach out to friends and family, anybody involved in sports in the Valley, and have them check out the site. I also urge you to use the‘Contact Us’ or ‘Make Us Better’ links and let me know how I can improve the site. Go ahead, be honest and be brutal with your thoughts, suggestions and critique – despite 23 years in the business, I’ll be the first to say that I’m still learning every day. And another goal for Hudson Valley Sports Report is to make it a site that utilizes true community journalism. So if you’re at a game and want to send in a picture that can be used with the write-up, do it by clicking on the ‘Send Us Photos’ link.
You know, if you read my bio in the ‘About Us’ link to this site, you’ll see that I’ve covered the World Series, Super Bowls, college football national championships, covered what is arguably the greatest college sports program in the country in the University of Michigan, and more. It’s not self-congratulatory or a pat on my own back – there are far more sportswriters out there with greater resumes than mine.
No, I mention this because even with all that, some of the most enjoyable moments of my life have been spent chronicling the triumphs, the achievements and, yeah, the sadness of athletes who walk not through the tunnels of Yankee Stadium or Crisler Arena at Michigan or at Giants Stadium, but who toil on the fields at John Jay, or the basketball court at Highland, or the soccer pitch at Arlington, or the diamond at Marist College.
I was there when the Poughkeepsie boys won the 1995 state basketball championship, standing in the middle of true, unbridled joy. I was there when the Highland boys won the state soccer championship in 1987 on a November day that was so frigid, the kids –smartly and unashamedly – wore pantyhose from their mothers and sisters underneath their soccer shorts to keep warm. I was there in 1987 when Roosevelt and Our Lady of Lourdes won girls’ basketball state titles on back-to-back days. I was there when Tracy Patterson won the first of his two world boxing titles in 1992.
I was also there when Patterson lost the title in 1995 to a then-virtual unknown named Arturo Gatti. I was there in the press box at Stitzel Field in 1989 when Gary Montalto had one of his state-title worthy Arlington soccer teams, only to watch an unheralded Middletown team stun the Admirals in overtime, prompting then-Ketcham coach Jeff Behnke – who was standing next to me – to utter “Oh my God, they just lost,” and then pick both our mouths up off the floor. And I was there in 1994 when the Marist men’s basketball team was just seconds away from hosting the conference championship game at the McCann Center with a possible trip to the NCAA tournament on the line, when a kid named Mustafa Barksdale hit a four-point play to give Monmouth an incredible, stunning semifinal win.
That’s why I’ve started Hudson Valley Sports Report. If I get to see half of the stuff I saw in my first go-round covering local sports, I’ll be a blessed, lucky man.