It's All About the Pivot

Well. It’s been a minute.

I want you all to know that I’m still very much alive after my first summer covering the recruiting landscape. Which was preceded by my first foray into covering high school lacrosse in Massachusetts. Which also coincided with my first season as an assistant coach at Hopkinton. Oh, and also manufacturing an avalanche of content over at New England Lacrosse Journal (who have been very gracious in their persistent employment of your boy).

I needed a break, so I took it.

But now it is winter (even though it was 50 degrees out in the Shire yesterday) and future plans are taking shape. If you’re reading this, you also just got an email asking for paid subscriptions earlier today. I always feel weird asking for money, but that is the lacrosse writer’s plight - always in constant need of support and validation. Oh, wait, that’s all writers of everything. I’ll get over the shame spiral eventually, but for now, I just want to say thank you. If you considered giving me a single dollar, I am grateful.

So. Let’s get to the business, then.

Writing about lacrosse is hard because writing about anything is hard. Not in the sense that it’s unattainable, but in the sense that it’s difficult to start. Recently, I had the chance to recommend a group of writers to a publication looking for content. I had a few names in my pocket/email so I doled them out. Now those writers are getting paid for their work. All they needed was a chance and a recommendation.

Here is what I want to do: I want to turn LacroCity into that chance for everyone.

This is an open invitation to showcase your work. Emailing editors and writers and coaches yourself is a one-way road to ghost town. But, you send me something, I will critique it - for free - and then post it here. If it sucks, I’ll tell you why it sucks, and we will fix it together. The only requirement is that it has to be about lacrosse in some way.

Then the piece lives here forever and you can show it to whomever you please. That’s it. That’s the deal. I’m open-sourcing the content FOR YOU.

What other outlet gives you that chance? Who else in lacrosse has every email and phone number for the manager(s) of every single lacrosse website on earth besides me? (I mean, probably lots of people, but they don’t have newsletters or a crippling need to empty their inbox.)

Do you want to get paid to write about lacrosse? This is a good first step. What people outside of the industry don’t know is that there are maybe four or five places that will give you monetary compensation for your writing in this sport. I have written for all of them. I know the editors, (uh, I actually am an editor for one), and everyone needs content. If you really want to do it, I’ll help get you there.

You get your own byline, you get published (Substack links are public, shareable, and postable to all forms of social media) and you get instant feedback. If the work is good enough, I’ll gladly send you on your way with a recommendation. No gaslighting. No bullshit. This isn’t about competition; it’s about development.

I know how hard it was for me to break into the [very small] business of writing about the sport that I love. And I want to make it easier. This platform, this tool, is the way that I can do that. Already a writer? Got something spicy to say? Hey, I like to burn things. Let’s focus the flame into an acetylene torch.

This is an open invitation to share the community that we built.

Is this a crazy idea? Yeah. It is. Is it surely going to backfire and get me spammed with parents writing advertorials about their sixth-graders who just got cut from their travel teams? Also, yes.

But I don’t care. These hands are for helping. The community needs more writers. I wasn’t a good college recruiter, but I am an excellent teacher of the game.

Send all of your submissions to my gmail. It’s the first letter of my first name and my last name, then the @.

What do you have to lose?