1,557 posts since February 10, 2009. We’ve come a long way as a site, folks.
Today, Team to Beat celebrates its third birthday, and we owe a lot of thanks, especially myself, to all of you who have read, retweeted, shared links and supported our site.
Though the view count has never been high… well except when we decided to post about lofty trade rumors that included Matt Kemp, David Wright and Grady Sizemore, we had more fun as a group knowing we were accomplished something a lot of other sites couldn’t do and that was show durability and consistency.
Hundreds of Phillies blogs popped up and vanished within the time frame of our birth. Some were even smash hits on Twitter. But they just couldn’t stick around.
The blog was created by myself, John Russo, in February of 2009 as a project for an online journalism class I was taking at Rowan University. The objective of the blog I called “Phillies Prof-ets” at the time was to talk about Rowan Phillies fans. Though there wasn’t much of that going on, the blog took a whole new direction in May 2009 when I decided to pursue the blog and called it by its name now.
Over the first full year, I added Dan MacNeal, Chris Bengel and Brian McCollum, three friends I’ve made through past blogging experiences, in college and during a handful of tailgates. We kept the site strong and I decided that we should actually form a real “team” so to say.
I added other fellow Rowan students Christian Hetrick and Brian Jacobs. I sent invites to friends Allison Stackhouse and Tiffany Steele. We merged with Twitter and Facebook sensation “The Philly Phans” and added their founder Kevin Kee and Phillies writer John Shields. Lastly, we added some character to the site last week when we invited the Goddess of Philadelphia fans, Keiana Williams.
I want to thank those 10 people for helping and contributing to our site. You guys have made these past three years so fun and enjoyable for me. I feel like I have been a part of something bigger than I imagined yet I know we can do so much more.
This baseball season is going to be huge for us. We are going to do our best to pump out more quality content than ever. We are also hoping to expand our coverage in ways very few blogs do.
We’ve come a long way from trying to mix hard news with a handful of goofy posts. Sure we will still have fun like Dan’s “Nacho Report” and will try to revive the “Face Offs” but this is going to be the year when we jump into the discussion for top Phillies blogs.
Again, I thank all of you for reading and supporting our site.
Most importantly, Go Phillies!
Yours truly,
John Russo
Founder of TTB, 2009
TTB 