A Little Background, and a Preview for Things to come

So what do you expect to see on the new Is It Sports? The best way to introduce you to the site is for me to introduce myself, and what I like and don't like in sports. Let's take it away....

Baseball: Growing up in the South Side of Chicago, I've been a White Sox fan since the day I was born, and their amazing World Series run last year was by far the greatest sports moment of my life. I'm pretty sure they'll be the #1 topic on this site, but definitely not the only one. Consequently, I'm not very fond of the other AL Central teams or the Cubs, but I kept my Cubs bashing to a minimum on the old site

Football: When you're a child of the 80's, it was hard not to love the San Francisco 49ers and their offensive firepower growing up. I picked them as my team when they won the Super Bowl on my 2nd birthday and I've stuck with them since, even with the hard times they've fallen on. My team "1b" is the Raiders. They are my dad's favorite team, and he's worked as a part time scout for them since 1997, so most of my NFL experiences (including sneaking into the RCA Dome as a member of the "camera crew") have been Raider-related. I'm also a big fan of the college game, with my alma mater Purdue Boilermakers as my favorite team.

Basketball: I guess I'm what you call a spoiled Bulls fan. The Bulls won their first NBA title when I was 8 so I didn't really appreciate the ladder they climbed the get to the top of the NBA. And then they kept winning, and winning, and winning, and pretty soon, it was big news in Chicago if they actually lost a game. Believe it or not, its hard to fall in love with a team when you've only seen them basically bore you with success. After their title runs, I lost interest in the NBA for a few years, only to get it back when I got involved in a fantasy basketball league, and my old high school classmate, Dwyane Wade, got drafted 5th overall in the draft. Where do I stand now? Well, I'm excited by the baby Bulls; I live in Indy now (and Detroit before that) so I've always hated the Pacers and Pistons; and I've adopted Wade's Miami Heat as a close 2nd favorite to the Bulls. I don't really get into college basketball until the tournament rolls around.

Hockey: I come from a city where the owner cares less about the team, I moved from a city that has fans so rabid it's impossible to get tickets (and happens to be the most hated rival of my hometown team) and now I live in a city that doesn't have a team. So even though I follow hockey (sort of) don't expect to see too much of it here (unless Ryan helps out with this blog, see below).

Other Sports
Golf: I'll actually be going to my first PGA Event, the International (featuring everybody's favorite modified Stableford Scoring System) in 2 weeks when I go to Colorado with my girlfriend, so I'll probably post on that. I've started to follow it a little more because of her, but I can't see myself posting on it too often.

Tennis: No Thanks....wait I have an opinion...Serena Williams is not hot! She never has been, never will be.

Auto Racing: I sorta follow NASCAR, always pulling for the Chevy drivers of course, and I'll probably get even more interested now that I'm a real automotive engineer instead of making sheet metal look pretty like I was doing before. Indianapolis is the only place in the world that cares about the IRL, and I don't plan on joining the rest of my new city.

Soccer: I'm Italian, so watching Italy win the World Cup was a lot of fun (especially beating France in the process) but now that it's over, I won't care again until 2010.

Other stuff: I'll probably just talk about what's on my mind sometimes too, whether it be music, cars, the little nuances of life in Indiana, or whatever. That's why the site is called Is It Sports? because when Ryan and I created it, we weren't sure how much we'd actually talk about sports.

Well now that I've covered that, the original purpose of Is It Sports? was to post some of the crazy IMs Ryan and I had, but then we started writing ridiculously long posts, and the formatting and overall length got to me and Ryan started his own blog. Now that I have this up and running, Ryan will probably be joining me on posts every now and then, maybe once a week. We're working on a plan to do this right now, and you'll probably be seeing more (and hopefully more entertaining) posts in the future.

Is It Sports? returns....in different form

This may be the first Is It Sports? blog post, but it has some history...

My friend Ryan and I started a yahoo geocities site back in January 2005 at www.geocities.com/isitsports. We had a great time doing it and pumped out a lot of entertaining posts (mostly by Ryan, who is a far better writer) but since I was the only one that knew how to use frontpage to actually update the site, our number of posts began to dwindle as I got involved more with my new job. Eventually, Ryan created his own blog called the Victoria Times. (Check it out, its really good). Anyway, I noticed that its probably way easier to edit the site through blogspot so I'm going to attempt to bring Is It Spors? back to life through here. I'll have a legit post again soon, this is more of a test than anything else.