How it all began

And with that, a Twitter account was born.

It would be nice to say there was some grand plan, some elaborate blueprint to how this began. In my head, I have crafted the origin story as sitting in a Smitty’s restaurant in 100 Mile House, BC, coming back from following the TBirds through Alberta and Prince George. On the eve of the trade deadline, and finding out one of my favorite players had been traded, I decided that I had enough thoughts and stats about Seattle to make a go of it. All of that is true, except for the last part.

No, the genesis of the Twitter account and the subsequent blog is much less impressive. Using my personal account at the time, I would periodically tweet out interesting facts and such about the Thunderbirds (tidbits, if you will) but most of my friends didn’t really care. More and more, it’s all my personal Twitter account became. The choice was to either find people who do care and keep posting or spare my friends every detail I was digging up about the hockey team I followed. The former won out.

Fast forward to tonight and it’s time to celebrate our first birthday. I’ve thrown a lot of facts your way and hopefully analyzed numbers logically. While keeping a focus on the TBirds, I’ve also tried to examine some other areas that you may also find interesting. Through the Twitter account, I’ve reached a wide audience of people. The most popular tweet was not a pleasant one but the picture of Nikita Scherbak on a stretcher spread around North America very quickly. It was a real eye-opener as to how fast social media works (and a reminder that once you put something out there, it’s no longer yours). I’ve also heard from former players when we send them birthday wishes and find that interesting to be able to interact with them after all these years. On the blog, we enjoyed our interviews with Noah Henry and Erik Hannon, diving into the problems of the WHL website and looking through season ticket prices around the league.

Of course, I would be tweeting and writing for no one if it wasn’t for all of you. The 350+ followers, the people who don’t follow but get our tweets through other sources, and the readers of the blog are what keep me going. I enjoy the feedback I receive from the readers and appreciate that people turn to me for answers. It shows that I’ve earned your trust which I don’t take lightly. I try to be my best to be accurate all the time to maintain that trust.

So thanks to all of you for a great year and here’s to hopefully many more!