Why I Started The SMSports Weekly 🤔

Hello and welcome to The SMSports Weekly! 🏈📲

If you don’t know what SMSports means, it’s Social Media in Sports, just looks cooler to say SMSports from my POV.

Now, onto the important stuff.

Why did I start The SMSports Weekly?

I started the newsletter for three reasons (I love putting lists in threes FYI):

1. I love sports 🏀! I have been a sports fan ever since I could remember. Maybe around the age of six or seven years old, I started going to games. Whether it be seeing Dodgers pitcher Hideo Nomo in the mid-1990s or John Elway win his first Super Bowl in 1998 with the Broncos (which I watched on TV and quickly became a Broncos fan). Sports has always been essential to my upbringing. It’s what bonded myself, my dad and brother together. We would go to Dodgers games, Clippers not Lakers (yes, I know who Elton Brand, Corey Maggette and Darius Miles are and was a fan during the losing years), Broncos games and an occasional Avengers or LA Kings game. I even got to go to an LA Xtreme game back in the day (I have an XFL football lying around my parent’s house somewhere). My father and I got close as we went to three US Opens before I turned 20. The US Open is always during Father’s Day weekend, so it has a special place in my heart. With all that said, I love sports and although I didn’t turn out to be the Jewish Larry Bird like I hoped, I wanted to make a career out of it (which I have and proud of my accomplishments.

2. I love social media 🤳! I didn’t only grow up on sports, but on social media as well. I remember creating my AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) account and calling creating the username HoopstarASE (ASE for my initials). Later, moved onto the MySpace era and finally beginning my true social media journey on Facebook in 2007 or 2008. I wasn’t say I was hooked at first, but loved connecting with friends from school and writing status updates like “feeling like I have the flu. Anyone else got it too?” I created my Twitter account (I’ll never call it X, btw) in 2009 and my Instagram account in 2014. Social media has always been a place where people can express themselves. Of course, there are trolls, cyberbullying and other forms of negativity that come with it, but overall a majority of the world population uses it for positivity. My sports social media career began a year after graduating from Indiana University. In 2014, I moved to Atlanta and started my career at Turner Sports. I got the opportunity to work on accounts like NBAonTNT, NBATV, MarchMadness and I even launched the PGA Instagram account! I then spent the next three years working at Bleacher Report in NYC (2015-2018) and finally returning home to work for the NFL Network in 2018 and 2019. I’ll get into more of my experience later on, but I know a lot about sports social media and even wrote a book on the topic, “The Evolution of Sports Social Media,” which has sold nearly 500 copies in over 2 years (humble brag 😄).

3. Finally, I love writing ✍️! I have had a passion for writing ever since I was in middle school. I used to pick up the Los Angeles Times from my driveway and read sports writers like Bill Plaschke, JA Adande, TJ Simers and others. I also loved reading John Feinstein books (the book “The Punch” got me fascinated with writing). I was able to learn from these top sports writers the more I read and consumed written content. I started writing for the high school newspaper (I went to a school called L.A.C.E.S. and our mascot was the Unicorn…how embarrassing). I later wrote in college for the Indiana Daily Student, where I covered sports like field hockey, softball, volleyball, soccer, football and more. I was able to write over 400 articles and nearly 250 blogs in four years. I finally wrote a book before I turned 30 years old (a goal of mine). It’s about my experiences in sports social media and the history of the topic in other people’s minds. I interviewed over 100 people for the book and am very proud of how it turned out. I hope to write more books in the future, just tough to write about social media cause it changes so quick.

With all this being said, I decided to create a newsletter called The SMSports Weekly. It will be a weekly newsletter that will come out every Monday morning (7 AM PT/10 AM ET) to discuss all things sports social media. From popular posts to companies/brands doing the medium the right way and even a occasional mention of an athlete who messed up. I will discuss trends, algorithms (make it less boring) and anything else on my mind.

Whether you love sports, social media and/or sports social media, I’m excited for you to subscribe and follow along!

Welcome to The SMSports Weekly! Enjoy the ride! 🏎️a