Welcome to 10th Year Seniors

by RENALDO

 

 

It was a random Tuesday afternoon.

After a failed attempt to listen to local sports talk radio (because there’s only so many times you can hear about the Lakers’ relevance to every conversation and nicknames of old Bahamian athletes), the conversation within my inner circle shifted across a few topics  – whether being a good defender comes down to the “nature vs. nurture” argument, to how underrated Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy continues to be as a landmark film, to whether Eli Manning was on drugs or had his powers stolen by the football version of the All-Star Mon-Stars. This was us everyday, and for some reason we felt like more people needed to hear this.

It was at that point that we realized a few things:

Sports journalism has changed…but the Bahamian media hasn’t changed with it.

There’s a level of uncertainty that hovers over the start of any project, particularly one like this, subjective in nature.

In a world where social media representations of life have almost surpassed real life in terms of importance, where likes and shares are the be all and end all, we’ll have to balance hard sports news with opinion and somehow appeal to a cross section of demographics at the same time.

When we decided to do this site, our intention was to produce content, put some unsolicited ideas into the universe and ultimately get you to like us enough to return to our page.

That’s the most simplistic way to put it.

More young people today get their news from shows like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report than the evening nightly news.

It’s not much different with sports.

Instant gratification, real time reporting, digital media outlets are a completely undersourced market for this genre in the Bahamas.

Despite living in the Bahamian vaccuum where newspaper readership hasn’t declined for some reason, we’re still missing that digital option to explore beyond track and field or specific niche markets.

 

We also realise that sports fans aren’t one dimensional, therefore our website won’t be. That old myopic mindset of “stick to sports” is done. In fact we’ll venture far away from sports in search of whatever we deem interesting.

The first step you need for something like this is a coalition of the willing. Like minded individuals with (what we hope) is the ability to generate ideas but at the same time capable of executing them. The fellowship of the Ring wouldn’t have worked if everyone around Frodo didn’t kick orc-ass to the point of genocide. This is going to take a team.

Think of a homeless man’s version of Bill Simmons’ Grantland and that’s what 10th Year Seniors sets out to be.

We’re not trying to re-invent the wheel, just duplicate it.

With a reporter, screen writing number cruncher, real estate agent and a former pro-athlete historian, we think we can make a pretty cool wheel.

We are Bahamian. We will focus on stories from a Bahamian perspective, but are by no means limited to content within the country.

In addition to that, our team is in no way complete.

We want to keep growing, adding people, network exploring ideas,  and angles on sports and pop culture that we have no idea about. As much as we would like to entertain readers and viewers, the website itself is about a learning process.

Like Simmons said in the Grantland launch “You figure out what works, you figure out what doesn’t work, you keep moving….”Eventually, we will evolve into what we are. Whatever the hell that is.”

We had a few objectives in place for what we hope to do with this whole thing: 1 – To establish a contemporary online platform for commentary presented in various platforms; 2 -To develop an online following and garner new subscriptions through relevant and engaging content; 3 – To provide fresh unique content in real time and in depth coverage; 4 – To establish a database and recruiting service for for perspective collegiate student athletes.

If we can lend insight, spark debate, even make you laugh a few times then the effort was worth it.

Ideally, all we really want to do is fill that void on a Tuesday afternoon…everyday.

 

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