Change is a Constant
By Wally Fish
For those of you who are regular readers of Seedlings to Stars, you may have noticed that I haven’t published anything in about a week. The reason for that is fairly straightforward. At the end of October an opportunity presented itself for me to take over one of our network’s local sites, and it wasn’t just any local market, it was Kansas City.
I’ve been with S2S since it’s launch back in May of 2011 and have served as the site’s Editor, writing daily, for the last five months. Even before I was pressed into action as the Editor following Scott Keltner’s departure (due to his other career) I have functioned as the behind-the-scenes manager of the site so Nathaniel and then Scott could focus all their energy on producing content. To say I have a lot vested in this site would be a selling things short, but the reality is that in terms of my writing, this site has never been perfect fit. Of course at the outset I didn’t think that way but it has been something that was started to wear on me as the recent weeks and months have passed.
I take pride in my work and, from a technical and factual standpoint, what I’ve published on this site (all 340 articles) are largely representative of that aspect of my writing. What has been absent however is a sense of creativity and true passion for the subject matter as well as any sort of real bias or emotion. The former just kind of happened even though I love following prospects, minor league baseball and the MLB draft, while the latter was largely by design. I make no secret that I am a Royals and Twins fan, but in covering prospects for all 30 organizations I didn’t feel it was appropriate to allow my biases to come across (though I’m sure they slipped through on more than one occasion).
In making the move over to our KC Local, I can remove those restrictions from my work and write with my hometown biases freely.When I started with FanSided back in February of 2009 it was as Editor of our Royals site Kings of Kauffman (though it briefly existed under a different name) and while I’ve learned a great deal from my journey across several sites, I look forward to writing about the Royals for FanSided once again. I’m also relishing the chance to spread my wings in terms of topic and go beyond covering baseball. With the freedom to cover any and all teams in the Kansas City market I will get to publish content on the Chiefs, Jayhawks, Tigers, Wildcats, Sporting KC and several other pro teams in lesser known leagues such as the Mavericks (CHL), Comets (MISL), T-Bones (American Association Baseball), UMKC etc. I remain a baseball writer at heart so you can expect plenty of content on the Royals and AL Central (and some prospect coverage too!) but am looking forward to the challenge that these other topics will prove me.
I live in Kansas City, and have since the fall of 2000. It’s where my wife and I chose to settle and start a family after college. I follow all the areas teams to varying degrees and have access to attend or watch all the games for all of the teams on television. It’s going to be a challenging beat, but given the flexibility of topic, accessibility of subject matter and my own heart running out KC Local is an opportunity that I simply can’t pass up.
I hope some of you will take some time every now and then to head on over to my new home and check out my work. The site is currently Fountain City Focus but will we be relaunching and changing it from a .co sit to a .com with a new domain name. I haven’t started writing over there just yet as I wanted to take a break for a week and tie up some loose ends. My debut post on FCF should be up on Thursday if not before.
A hearty thanks goes out to all of you that have supported my work on this site and I hope you will continue to keep S2S in your regular, or semi-regular, rotation of sites you read. Things here will continue on and while we are currently in the process of looking for my replacement (if you’re interested in becoming the next S2S Editor, click here) the rest of the staff continues to craft and publish content.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 18 months and despite all the obvious reasons for me to make the jump to FCF, it was still a difficult decision to leave S2S.
In the end however, change is a constant and my heart is in Kansas City.