A story about trying to build a business, and accidentally creating a community.
It’s a mid-March Friday night in Louisville, Kentucky. Traditionally, this night has been one of great sentiment in the area. Many conference tournament semifinal games were decided on the second Friday in March.
In a basketball-crazed town, regardless of the success of the local teams, there’s a different feeling in the air this time of year.
The city awakens from three to four months of relative anonymity. Oftentimes, our only social events are gatherings centered around Louisville basketball.
So, when the opportunity to step outside or open a window and do a little spring cleaning arises, it’s become synonymous with important college basketball games. The games where fans are living and dying by every possession.
These nights have been a little different, however, since the pandemic coincided with a steep drop-off in performance for our beloved Cards.
Perhaps it’s a serendipitous over-correction into a lane of sheer excitement and joy for meaningful postseason basketball. But, my hope is that a culmination of hard work and patience landed me on a couch with some Louisville legends.
2005 Final Four member Perrin Johnson is to my right, chopping it up, telling stories in a very Perrin way, and refilling my wife’s wine glass. Louisville football legend Maria Urrutia towers over the group to our left.
The room is filled with a group of friends and creatives — all of whom have been instrumental parts of my life over the last several years.
We are watching the ACC Tournament semifinal game on a live stream, enjoying some libations, eating great food, and hitting golf balls into a Trackman screen.
11-year-old me would’ve shit his pants if he knew this was my life.
My friends and acquaintances are people I used to look up to from afar.
I’m part of a large, but intimate community that shares my passion for Louisville, sports, and the increasingly important intersection between UofL athletics, culture, and our community.
For me, fun experiences like this have become commonplace. But the journey that got me here deserves some recognition.
The Blueprint
When we married, my wife’s non-negotiable was living in Oldham County to keep her kids in their school district. The catch? Houses fitting our needs and budget didn’t exist.
So, while it felt a bit ostentatious for my taste, we decided to build our own home.
I want to clarify — I did literally none of the work, which makes me feel like a lazy millennial. However, ”building” a house, even without lifting a finger, is equal parts exciting, exhausting, and nauseating. You’re sinking your hard-earned savings into this husk, letting strangers decide the fate of what you’ll live in for the foreseeable future.
Above all else, building is a daunting exercise in patience.
It’s difficult to see the vision at first.
You start with a plot of land. Just a vacant, empty lot covered in dirt, clay, and rock.
Over time, your foundation is laid, the structure begins to take shape, and the framing goes up.
Before you know it, you have things like doors and windows. A roof. Maybe even some electrical and plumbing runs.
But the time it takes to get from signing the paperwork to moving into your new home feels like an eternity.
In the interim, my wife and I were cooped up in a tiny apartment with all of the belongings, children, dogs, etc. that come from two divorced households, counting down the days.
We set up shop just around the corner, essentially, from where the house was being built, checking in almost daily to see the progress.
During that time of… intense intimacy with the children and critters, we learned a lot about each other.
Most importantly, it was a great lesson in taking things day by day—literally watching our lives be built brick by brick.
The Foundation
“Brick by brick” is an idiom whose overuse is not lost on me. But it’s a very real metaphor for how my current life situation came to be.
It started with a DM from a familiar name with an unfamiliar story.
In 2018, I was a recent college graduate with no clear direction.
Jacob Lane was a new dad looking for a way to make a little extra cash.
What started as something fun to do turned into an addiction. That addiction led to new relationships, opportunities, and adventures.
I went to elementary school with Jacob. I remembered Jacob well. We had many of the same teachers over the years. We played basketball together- kind of. We were on the same team, wearing matching jerseys. I was the kid that the coaches had to put in because, well, that’s the rules. Jacob played the important parts of the game. We came from vastly different backgrounds, but the connection at a young age was important.
We parted ways in middle school, but I graduated high school with his now-wife, Taylor. Yes, I am aware that is a very Louisville-coded, two degrees of separation connection.
Jacob was looking for someone to help him manage a website covering Louisville sports. In return, we’d be compensated with what started as about a cup of gas station coffee a day by the parent website.
I didn’t care about the money. I wanted in.
The chance to take about five percent of the thoughts in my brain and put them on a site not named Facebook or Twitter seemed enticing.
Jacob, unbeknownst to me, was often reading my late-night social media rantings and musings about Louisville sports and life in general from afar.
We hit the ground running. The ground, in this case, being the belt of a treadmill, and the running, more or less, being in place.
But we were doing it! Becoming buds. Writing about stuff we loved. We got up early every morning or stayed up late at night, writing about any Louisville-related content we could think of.
Starting out, we were writing a lot of words that almost nobody was reading. Like, maybe my mom and some loyal reader in Germany. That was it.
But, as these things go, we just kept writing. Day after day. Sometimes 3, 4, or 5 articles a day. Perfecting what our style, brand, and voice would be.
Finally, slowly, but surely, people started reading. Some would say mean things. Others would say less mean things, which was nice of them. But, eventually, the hard work was being seen by others who cared. And, damn, what a rewarding feeling that was.
The first bricks were laid.
The Framework
We amassed a following on social media and got others to join us. They’d write. We would edit. We’d write more and then edit.
Over the course of 2 or 3 years, we met dozens of new people interested in sharing their love for Louisville and Louisville sports.
Even though most only pitched in for a short stint, the friendships made along the way were an important part of the story. After all, they started as fellow nerds reading along and wanting to give their input.
What remained were the early pieces of a like-minded community.
Eventually, we were to the point where Jacob and I talked non-stop every day. We wrote every free chance we had, and we were completely ready for what was next.
That’s when the important first seeds of a podcast were planted.
Jacob and I purchased a mixer, some microphones, and all of the accoutrements needed to live out every mid-20’s white guy’s dream: Talking into the void for an hour and hoping other people value our opinions.
It’s pretty egotistical if you think about it. Grown men talking into microphones together, giving opinions and hot takes; audaciously assuming we could provide any sort of relevant insight.
Over 90 percent of podcasts are abandoned within the first three episodes. 95 percent don’t make it to 20 episodes, and it’s easy to see why.
The first podcast we ever recorded was an absolute shit show.
Five of us gathered at our buddy Ethan’s Cardinal Towne apartment. No plan, no real knowledge of how to run a mixer board, and definitely no solid insights or well-trained ability to give organized, concise thoughts.
The result was three hours of rambling, incoherent discussion, and our buddy Ross’s air fryer coming in hotter than any of our takes.
As we learned to create podcasts, the behind-the-scenes was as crude as it gets. We set up a mixer at my kitchen table and didn’t unplug it or move any cables for almost a year. We made plans to sneak people into my apartment while I was away at work so they could have their turn at the kitchen table. The obstacles were endless: Dogs barking during interviews, recordings failing to load, power outages, technical issues, guests no-showing at the last second. You name it, and it’s happened.
Reality set in quickly. We needed a lot of practice and even more patience.
Slowly, we began to lay the foundation.
We learned to edit and organize a show. We stumbled our way through learning how to host guests and how to make things that people wanted to listen to.
Eventually, just like our writing, the listeners started to trickle in.
We were part of the 5 percent.
The Zuck Moment
One thing that I miss most about people hauling ass to my house after work to record an in-person show is the camaraderie.
Most shows would end with us taking off our headphones, replying to our wives’ “ETA?!” texts, and someone inevitably asking…
“Roosters?”
That’s where I found myself with Jacob and our buddy Tyler one night, brainstorming new ideas.
Jacob and I had been dreaming up an idea to start our own website. A place where there are no rules, no stipulations from a parent company, and no regulations on how often we needed to write.
We wanted to tickle our brains more, instead of offering up another boring helping of “three things to watch for Louisville football” or “top five games to catch this weekend”. We wanted freedom to create and to put our own spin on things. To use profanity, tell jokes, make other people laugh and feel good, and give opinions that were outside the box.
We wanted to be curious; To make content that was exciting and completely different than what any Louisville fan, or fan of any other team, expects.
The plan for this night was to come up with a name for our hypothetical website. And it happened exactly like a kitschy writer or director would script it in a movie.
Jacob had a pad of paper, etching ideas into neat little lists. I housed a basket of boneless wings and shouted out terrible ideas. Tyler mediated.
There must have been 400 names thrown around, each of them worse than the previous one.
Cardinal Report? Lame.
Louisville Sports Zone? Nope.
Louisville Updates? Boring.
Nothing even came close to what we were looking for.
About two hours in, the next brick was laid.
“It just has to fit the perfect criteria,” I (probably inaccurately) remember saying aloud. “We’re essentially wanting to give an update on the *state* of Louisville sports and culture.”
There was a dramatic pause.
The State of Louisville? Could it be that simple?
It almost didn’t feel right at first. I kept going. Jacob hung on to that thought and wrote it in big bold letters in the top margin. We just kept coming back to it. It was too perfect.
I quickly searched trademarks and LLC availability for the State of Louisville. Nothing. Social media? Good to go.
It was like Justin Timberlake telling fake Zuck to drop the “The”. It was a landmark moment in our lives. We left Roosters with a plan that night and told absolutely no one for months.
Now should be the point in the story where I screw over the Winklevosses and dilute all of Eduardo’s shares.
Instead, I remember this being the part where I get thoughtful.
As a team, this is a time when we had to go back to being kind of stupid.
We had all of the experience under our belts. Jacob and I learned how to write thoughtful versions of articles and appealing to a wide array of audiences.
We knew how to reach those audiences by optimizing our articles to pick up on Google first and take precedence on other websites.
I became well-versed in quickly building and capturing a loyal social media following.
We were, at this point, becoming proficient at creating palatable and captivating podcast episodes.
In short, we knew how to build the house. But we wanted to build on our own now, generate our own equity, and enjoy the fruits of our own labor.
So, we took the leap with no safety net, dipped into our savings, and took a real stab at creating our own website.
The Rebuild
Look, I’m not going to act like we did something heroic here by starting our own website and business.
However, I will say that it was a risk.
We sacrificed a lot of time, money, sleep, and brain power to figure out how to make something work.
The risk, of course, being that we fail and look stupid. The risk being that the time away from our families, or cramming in that one last thing before running out the door for work, or typing one last paragraph before slamming the laptop shut at 1 AM — That all of that was for nothing. That our efforts go unrecognized. That the community that we created would be lost.
And, of course, we failed. A lot. And looked stupid, at least a moderate number of times.
A small group of people knew who we were and happily followed us over to the new site.
But, for the most part, we were back to square one. Very few listening or reading. No social following. No traction. Everything that we’d built previously, we’d have to do again. This time, with our own money, our own time and efforts, and using our own problem-solving skills to get shit done.
Brick by brick.
The Evolution
Flash forward five years.
The State of Louisville is in a state that we likely didn’t imagine at that table at Roosters.
The brand itself is strong. Social engagement is high.
Among websites, blogs, and similar brands that people built on their own accord, ours has certainly carried its own weight.
The podcast game became so successful that it was and is our bread and butter.
At one point or another, we have had seven podcasts at once under the State of Louisville umbrella.
Jacob’s a psychopath. He will host a podcast, edit it, and have it turned around and published the next morning. For reference, for every minute that you record, it can take a good editor 2-3 minutes to edit. So, do that math.
As I said from the beginning, it’s an addiction. And among addicts, I’d put my partner up against most.
My responsibilities have always been focused on the creative side. I publish social content, planning, scripting, and publishing engaging posts on all social platforms. Creating more long-form written content, while straying from the throwaway clickbait news updates when possible.
Jacob and I split duties hosting our basketball- and football-centric podcasts.
Together, it’s a two-headed monster of planning and creativity. Nearly a decade of speaking almost every day gets you to a point where you anticipate what the other person is going to ask you to do.
Jacob is analytical. He charts and puts everything into spreadsheets. He fills up our content calendars. I find that deadlines and analytical organization methods hinder my creativity. I save color-coded calendars and spreadsheets for my day job. This is fun time; I just grab a laptop and write. The notes section of my phone is a catch-all of ideas, intriguing statistics, captivating quotes, and the occasional grocery list.
It’s important to note that, while taking completely different avenues may seem unconventional, this absolutely works.
It’s also important to note that we each detest the other’s way of organizing.
But you put the two of us in a meeting room together, and we could sell you on just about anything and then immediately get to work and execute on the discussed strategies.
Brick by brick, we’ve built a reputable brand, and we’ve built trust with other reputable brands.
We mess up a whole lot. Maybe now more than ever.
But our ability and trust in ourselves to find the right words, the right timing, the best possible content ideas, and ultimately execute on that serve as a pretty solid mitigating factor for those mess-ups.
When time allows, we are still laying bricks.
The Settlement
Building something durable means knowing when the plans have to change.
Every structure eventually faces a stress test.
For a minute, we thought we had the blueprint perfected. We partnered with Floyd Street Media and the 502 Circle, stepping into the “big leagues” of local sports business. It felt like the definitive validation of everything we’d built.
Except, in sports and media, the foundation is always settling.
Just a few months in, the landscape shifted beneath us when the 502 Circle was acquired by the University of Louisville. Suddenly, the partnership model dissolved.
We spent the next year operating back in our familiar media-company capacity, but the writing was on the wall: the wild west of independent sports commentary was colliding with institutional reality.
At the same time, life outside of a laptop and a microphone came rushing in. I started a new job, life got really expensive, and my wife and I found out we were expecting. The 1 AM writing sessions and the frantic editing marathons weren’t just exhausting anymore; they were unsustainable.
So, we had to do what was best. We didn’t implode, and we didn’t sell out in a blaze of glory. We simply evolved. Jacob is taking the reins as the owner, stepping into a new role combining brands with some like-minded individuals with the 1912 Society. Jacob and Dalton Pence are joining a talented group that will continue to push the envelope with exclusive shows and deep coverage.
Along with it, our hosts (Keith Arutoff, Vince Lococo, Alan Thomas, and Ryan Keeling) will continue to release the same podcasts you’ve come to know and love.
You see, all this time, we’ve been building something that we never really defined as such, but for all intents and purposes is a certified banger of a Louisville-centric media company.
The last thing missing was full backing and support of a partner whose vision aligns with ours. That’s why the guys at 1912 Society felt like the perfect fit.
With a platform that was built as a fully independent, free-to-use app for Louisville sports fans, 1912’s mission feels entirely aligned with our goals and will allow us to continue growing this wacky, wonderful community.
For the first time, it feels like it’s finally move-in day.
The Expansion
Along the way, we didn’t just build a brand; we built an accidental farm system for sports media in this town.
Over the last eight years, more than 100 people wrote, recorded, or edited for us. We were a launching pad.
Look at the lineage:
DJ Bieneme started with us, and now he’s covering the Houston Texans for ESPN.
Matt McGavic, an original anchor of our football coverage, just secured a job with WHAS11.
Benton Newman and Zach Allen-Kelly, our early soccer podcast hosts, evolved into Soccer City, a radio show for Louisville City and Racing Louisville.
Roman Kelly and Dalton Pence went from our orbit to running stadium production, broadcasting, and PA announcing for the Louisville Kings, with Roman emceeing and Dalton on the mic.
Our longtime photographer, Jared Anderson, has been featured in the Courier-Journal and Sports Illustrated among a long list of national publications.
We traveled the country covering games, but watching the community that helped us get here? That’s the real legacy.
Home
That Friday night in March, sitting on that couch watching Louisville and Clemson while golf balls smashed into a Trackman screen, felt like a movie because it was the culmination of a decade of chaos. We went from warning our wives we’d be late from Roosters to building a network, selling it, watching it get absorbed, and finally letting it transform into its next iteration.
I don’t write four articles a day anymore. I have a growing family and plans to build something extraordinary of my own. And that creative autonomy will only stand to serve us well going forward.
Jacob announced our plans recently, and the response was overwhelming. And it came from people that were involved in every stage of our journey.
It’s allowed us to return to those moments a decade ago: Just two long-lost friends pecking away at a keyboard. It forced us to revisit those old relationships – Writers, podcasters, editors, or the group of folks that were just reading along. The internet friends that simply wanted to help, or to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
That is undoubtedly our proudest achievement. We know we didn’t just build a house. We built a community.
This “job” has taken me to places and created relationships with people that I’d never have expected.
But it all started with that first message; The first brick laid.
Our house is an ongoing labor of love, built on a foundation of communication and a willingness to make mistakes.
To every person who has had a hand in laying the bricks, you’re important, you’re loved, and you’re always welcome – No matter what we call this home.
