The Origin Story

Everybody likes a good origin story. Here is how WisSports.net came into existence to where it is today. With my induction into WBCA Hall of Fame tonight there is no time better to spin this tale as it feels like the book will be officially shut on this chapter of my life once my name goes on the wall in the hallowed halls of the JustAgame Fieldhouse.?

Crash

It all started in college, sophomore year I got an internship at Sonic Foundry, which two months later turned into a full-time job. I learned everything about computers including how to set up servers that are used for things like web hosting, email and data backup. I had an amazing boss and teacher in Justin Jaeck , who was all of a year older than me, but still seemed to know so much and exemplified a tireless work ethic that you wanted to mimic.?

Sonic Foundry had a great company culture and it was super motivating to try to be the best at your job you could be. For me, I had a hard time wrestling with two of my main responsibilities - computer setup & tracking and tech support requests. I wanted to set up some simple web apps on our intranet so that I could track computers and so people could submit requests for support.?

Not knowing anything about web development, I asked for help from the other person that seemed to always be in the office at the weird hours I was forced to work due to my school schedule. Ryan Finley was a web developer on the team and it turns out was always at the office because of a side gig, a website called SurveyMonkey that made creating and analyzing surveys easy. I learned how to code from looking at his code and he was always generous with answers to my questions. (sidebar: need time machine to go back and ask him for a job instead of help with coding)

Fast forward to my senior year and one crisp fall afternoon I went into the office around 2pm to set up a new email server and study for my business law final that was the next morning. Door was locked. Corporate counsel came to the door and told me there was a massive 50%+ layoff at the company. I was let go from the job where I had put in so much hard work and where I had already accepted an offer to work when I graduated.?

I graduated college six months later in the spring of 2001 at the time when the dot-com bubble burst, the market tanked and everyone stopped recruiting fresh faced college grads. If you ranked the best years to graduate from college in the past 40 years, that would probably rank dead last.?

Sink

I was able to catch on with Supranet doing marketing and tech support. I was fired, they were a small staff and I had a problem finding an essential role. I then went on to EDS, which I could pen an entire 5000 word essay on. I’ll boil it down to this. If you have had the pleasure of watching the movie Office Space, that was essentially my life at EDS.?

I was tirelessly working to try and find a job somewhere as a web developer (sidebar: the fact that you couldn’t find a developer job in 2002 is funny to think about now that it is the hardest position to hire for).?

Name the company in Madison and I was probably turned down by them for a web developer position they posted. I remember three specifically where I got to the final two candidates but was not chosen. They all said the same thing - I need more to show in my portfolio.?

Rise

I needed to impress these hiring managers so I turned to one of my greatest passions - basketball. What I decided to build had many influences, but the main inspirations were the following:

1. I helped coach my former high school team in the summers after I graduated. I had a really hard time finding scores and standings for the players I coached.
2. My best friend Scott Jaeger was a standout cager for the Marian and there was a lively community posting on a message board at a website called D3Hoops.com. Nothing similar existed for high school basketball.
3. My former high school assistant coach and math teacher Tony Draves, went on to be an assistant coach at Marian and was telling me how difficult it was to follow recruits that were in outer areas, not covered by the local paper.
4. I loved the Wisconsin Basketball Yearbook, it was the bible for high school sports and I would wait for it patiently every year. However, it was static, what if I could do a version that kept up all the information year round. (Sidebar, my high school coach Randy Gorske had terrible handwriting and the two years I was featured on the North Fondy roster in the yearbook my names were Nick Kartaj and Nike Kantos)
5. My favorite bartender, Jason Kiley, kept talking about wanting to do a recruiting service for high school basketball players.?

So away I went, developing a website for high school basketball. Someone owned WiHoops.com and WisHoops.com so I went with WisHoops.net and called it Wisconsin Hoops Network to justify the .net. I labored every night after work from 5pm to midnight. When the basketball yearbook finally came out I stayed up til 2 or 3 in the morning entering in schedules and rosters.?

Hustle

Hosting a website back then was a very different experience to what it is today with the likes of AWS and Google Cloud Platform. First, I needed servers. Luckily, Sonic Foundry was liquidating hundreds of 1U servers that we used to convert songs from CD to MP3 for large music labels. I bought 4 1U servers for $50 each.?

While I was fortunate to have the experience to know how to set up the servers, I still needed to find somewhere to co-locate them. I went back to my old employer Supranet and a local host named Berbee and got quotes in the thousands of dollars per month. WisHoops.net was about to be over before it even started. (sidebar, I had next to no money)

Luckily for me, Justin recommended I talk to Jeff Funk , a local businessman and tech guru that had a fairly large sized dial-up business that he needed to maintain high bandwidth for. Sonic Foundry had hosted some servers with Jeff. I asked Jeff how much it would be and he said, “how much can you afford”.? I will never forget it.

Now comes the other issue, my full-time job. Burning the candle at both ends wasn’t sustainable. We had a number of people at EDS working 20 hours a week and other flexible arrangements. I explained my situation and asked if I could go down to 20 hours. It was declined.?

I decided to leap. I was able to get my dad to lend me $3,000 and my brother-in-law invested $10,000. I figured this would get me six months as life was cheap back in 2002. I was somehow able to get my roommate Kevin Pings to join Jason and I full-time. I can’t even figure out the math of how we all intended to pay for anything with only $13K. (Sidebar: I also developed websites for sports orgs on the side to help the cash flow - which is ironic if you look at my future work history)

I embarked on the other essential part of our business - making money. After numerous calls and meetings with potential advertisers I finally got one to say yes.? Kind of.? David Royston and Joy Royston run a successful clothing business in Wisconsin Dells called Sports Impressions. Dave and I hit it off right away, he told me about the club teams his sons were playing on and how he wanted to build a basketball facility down the street (what is now the JustAgame Fieldhouse).??

Then came the moment of truth. Was he a yes.? He was, IF, we could find a second advertiser. So technically he wasn’t the first until we found a second. Regardless, we were on our way.??

So if you’re following along, to launch WisHoops.net I needed

1. The dot com bubble to burst and the stock market to crash
2. To be fired from my first job only to catch on with the worst job imaginable
3. To have my request for half time at said worst job declined
4. Being rejected for hundreds of web developer jobs
5. Knowledge of how to develop websites and build databases
6. Knowledge of how to set up servers to deliver websites
7. Physical servers that I had to purchase
8. A place to put said servers that I could afford and had enough bandwidth
9. Some way to eat and pay rent

Launch

We launched on November 18th, 2002. I can still remember being in the office and watching the user counter on the message board that day and subsequent days. After one month we had 7,000 registered members. By the end of the season we had over 20,000 and 7 million page views.

The traffic was so large and especially heavy during the end of games when scores came in that my cheap-o servers weren’t strong enough to handle it. I had to develop a hack to serve static pages that were rebuilt every time a score or schedule change was entered.?

Towards the end of that first season I was approached by Tim Eichorst who had created a video production company called When We Were Young Productions. We agreed to merge our companies and Tim had a much needed investment infusion that bought us new servers and allowed us to hire a larger staff.?

And The Rest is History

Season 2: We added WisFootball.net and girls basketball coverage. We had plans to add more sports so we added Wisconsin Sports Network or WSN or WisSports.net to hold everything. We boosted pageviews to 20 million. Now merged with a video company we added some amazing video features like 3 minute NFL films style clips of high school games and player mix tape highlights. We were so far ahead of our time.?

This was such a magical season and the week before the state basketball tournament, the night before we were about to host high school coaches for a social at the Stadium Bar, I found out we were out of money and I had to fire everyone.

Season 3-5: We unwound our merger and WSN was now again independent. Jason and Rick stayed on staff. Everyone else, including me, found work elsewhere. We added a huge sponsorship with American Family Insurance and added a recruiting subscription service that helped keep the lights on.?

Huge props to Lance Walter and Mike White who brought me on as a developer at The Shop Consulting. While side gigging WSN and focusing on a job full-time wasn’t ideal (including using a good portion of my wages to keep WSN afloat) I was able to learn a ton from Lance and Mike around how to treat employees and how to run a successful small business.?

Season 6: Jumping off the cliff part two. I left my full-time gig to once again focus on WisSports.net. We made two major acquisitions. The first was Mark Miller and his Wisconsin Basketball Yearbook. The second was an upstart high school sports magazine called Wisconsin Preps Illustrated run by local writer (and eventual rock star advertising sales exec) Laura Ritchie .

Season 7-9: WSN was acquired by TDS Telecom to boost their efforts to deliver local content to their local customers. The initial plan was to replicate our model across all of their 32 states but unfortunately that was sacked about six months into the acquisition.?

I learned a ton at TDS about financial discipline and growing revenue. The growing revenue part can be directly attributed to Don Stephan who was an amazing mentor. He helped us get from $200,000 to $500,000 in revenue. Also a big shout out to Kim A. Egan KE Consulting LLC and Mike Zalewski that helped bring us in and make sure we were taken care of.

Season 10-13: WSN was acquired by Sport Ngin. Since TDS’s expansion plans for WSN were shelved I had spent a lot of time while at TDS trying to find the next lilly pad to jump to. I was fortunate to connect with Justin Kaufenberg and learn more about what they were doing at Sport Ngin. They had a really great web platform for youth sports but it was also powering a large high school content site for the Star Tribune that had a lot of similarities to what we were doing at WSN.?

While at Sport Ngin I managed less and less of the day-to-day content of WSN and was a Director of all of their content and advertising efforts.?

Too many people to thank at Sport Ngin. Along with Justin, co-founders Carson Kipfer and Greg Blasko were always huge supporters of what we were trying to do. Despite our time being short, I learned a ton from Jeff Liebl and Marc Ruskin while working with them.

Season 14: I left. After expansion plans for the WSN model in other states at Sport Ngin were also shelved and with the company growing larger and larger I got the itch to start another company. I penned a farewell column that sums it up pretty well (if you somehow got this far in this article and want to read more).?

Season 15-Today: I am so happy to see WSN is still going strong. Travis, Norbert and Mark have done a great job carrying the banner. Sport Ngin became SportsEngine and eventually sold it to VNN who was later acquired by rSchoolToday.?

It is hard to imagine that I created something that is still going on 20 years later. Who knows, maybe I'll buy it back some day.

Shoutout to all the folks that helped me get here mentioned in this tale. Also, big thanks to Joe Boucher who helped me through all of it from the legal side, becoming a friend and mentor along the way.