It is 4 a.m. and I cannot sleep. I have the rare 7:30 a.m. meeting that promises to be a good one. I am not going back to bed.
This is my 1700th post on hsbaseballweb. It's a lot, but not so many in comparison to so many others who have not been on these boards as long as me. For whatever reason, this is a big deal post to me.
I started reading not long after Bob Howdeshell started this site in 1998. My oldest son was 12 or 13 years old. Not long after that I began posting, although very infrequently at first.
From the start, I was amazed at the people here. Mostly they are all great, a few have been a little unusual, nearly all have been interesting. It is most amazing to see the good will, the great advice, all the interaction and an absolute willingness to help out one another in the vast majority of instances.
I have met a lot of the posters here over the years and enjoyed everyone of those meetings. One poster (mr mom) had a son who played with my oldest son at Virginia Tech. Luke Bell (Fungo) and Jerry Ford (PG Staff) have given advice that you just can't pay for. So have so many others like justbaseball (who is from Blacksburg, Va, where I went to college at Virginia Tech and whose son played for a USA team coached by the great man who coached all three of my sons in high school), infielddad, Cleveland Dad, hokieone (a fellow Hokie), etc... I have become Facebook friends with some great people I will never meet.
Some have passed on -- the principal, bbscout, Mary Ann Shappi and others. (I will never forget my sadness when I read the post from bbscout's son telling us all that his dad had died in his sleep the night before.) Some have stopped posting for one reason or another. Among them are BeenThereIll (who I actually met at the Junior Olympics in Tucson back in 1999), One Player's Pop, Gloveman, Leftydad, AParent, Chill, Bama Bomber, Jolly Roger, Hot Momma, and Bob, himself. Life changes and people move on, but, still, you wonder what became of them. One of my closest friends in AZ, I actually first encountered on these boards (rbinaz).
And nobody who has witnessed them will ever forget the legendary conversations (if that is the right descriptor) between TRhit and TPM. They are not so frequent now and I miss them.
And when it looked as if this site would disappear after Bob decided to step aside, he made a very wise 12th-hour decision to turn it over to Julie, who amazingly has kept it going and perhaps made it an ever better place.
I never thought when I first came across the hsbaseballweb that 14 years later I would be writing something like this. Baseball is way more than a game and has been the backdrop of an amazing family experience I never could have imagined would be this great. It is not over, but it is different now. This site, remarkably, has been a part of all of that.
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