Happy Anniversary To One Great Season

By JOHN P. WISE
One Great Season

On behalf of the entire team here at One Great Season, I'd like to extend a huge thank you to anybody who's helped our cause in the site's first year. And trust me; there are many of you!

That's right; One Great Season is celebrating its first anniversary Tuesday. Pictured above is the crowd that gathered at Times Square to mark the occasion at noon today. (Despite the high heat, many of them dressed as if it was New Year's Eve 10 years ago or something. Weird.)

It would be comical if I was to try to name everyone individually who's had a hand in helping the site, so I'll do it more by group:

Thanks to the generous donors, and to those still considering making a contribution of any denomination, it's never too late. The PayPal window is always open!

Thanks to the 40 or so friends and colleagues and friends of colleagues who tolerated my calls and emails and questions last summer when I was first considering launching this project.

Thanks to the Sports Information Directors and media relations offices at universities across the country. I covered 15 games last fall and had full-access credentials to cover 12 of them.

Thanks also to friends who let me crash on a couch or an extra bed or borrow a car when I was on the tour last fall. Thanks to others who picked up a meal here or there and to strangers who invited me to their tailgate parties.

Thanks to the many television and radio stations, as well as newspapers and websites that gave me and my little-project-that-could some badly needed publicity in just about every city I visited, and even a few that I didn't!

Thanks to those who've written for me, particularly recently during World Cup coverage. Nine writers contributed more than 70 stories over those five weeks. I'm forever grateful.

Thanks to our combined 1,300 or so Twitter followers and Facebook fans; your participation, feedback and comments have been a huge help and inspiration.

And last but quite certainly not least, thanks to you, the readers, who still come back day after day to read what I hope is content that you don't think you can get anywhere else.

OGS has some cool plans for a few new wrinkles in year No. 2. You may have already started to notice a couple subtle tweaks, but you'll start to see more upgrades as we get closer to the start of the college football season. And suggestions are always welcome and are never more than an email away!

Finally, a thank-you note like this would be remiss without a mom mention. She was always supportive of previous projects over the years, but this one took some convincing last summer. And here this site is now, broke as hell as we figured we'd be, but there's still a roof above my head and the lights are on. The AC works too, thank God. Thanks for believing in me and my site, to mom, and to everyone. Hope to see you around here again real soon.