Two years before I met this old friend, the sports dept. I managed did a multi-part (I think it ran for 15 weeks) series on how to get an athletic scholarship. I felt pretty good about the work we did on the baseball part of what we published. Without braggin too much, we received a lot of notoriety nationally, mostly because nobody had done anything like it.
Two years later, when it came to my own son, I quickly realized how fast the landscape changes. I was the clueless parent, proving that a little knowledge was a dangerous thing.
Sure, I've learned plenty over the years here. Some of it even about baseball. But the value isn't what I've learned, or whom I've been fortunate enough to have met through this place (real and cyber).
The value is knowing that there always is someone here who has been through what you're going through; someone who wants to know not just what you know, but what you think, and someone who is willing to help you remember why you came back after the first time (it ain't recruiting).
I don't visit as often as I did when the boys played ball; the remaining kids' singing/acting/modeling stuff takes up a lot of what free time I have now. But I do know that, professionally speaking, the next time we try something like we did years ago, the baseball story might come up short.
All I have to do is list the link.