From The Editor's Desk: Launch Day

From The Editor's Desk: Launch Day

This is a fine day to be part of Basketball Times.
Today, as the college-basketball season symbolically begins with the first day of practices across the nation, we launch Basketball Times Online, a site that anyone who loves college basketball will visit daily. We want BT Online to be the site that gains the sort of trust and respect that BT the Magazine has earned over the past 30 years.
If you’re unfamiliar with Basketball Times, it’s about time we met. BT has been around for more than 30 years, about 20 of them under the direction of the legendary Larry Donald, who gathered many of the nation’s top college writers in one publication.  Dick Vitale, Bob Ryan, Dick Weiss, Billy Reed, Robyn Norwood and Rick Bozich still write for BT.  Dan Wetzel, John Feinstein, Mike DeCourcy, Andy Katz, Adrian Wojnarowski, Charles Pierce, Frank Burlison, Caulton Tudor – they’re all members of BT’s distinguished alumni.
This is our chance to produce a college basketball site that combines the journalistic standards of the magazine with the realities of an Internet world.  We have enlisted a number of veteran writers – some of whom also lost jobs but still feel like they have a lot of college basketball to cover – who want to participate by contributing stories to the site.  We might even discover a coach or two who wants to express his opinion on a new rule or development.  We’ll post links to breaking stories and opinions from the nation’s top newspapers.
BT Online would not be possible without Brendan F. Quinn, a talented 27-year-old who has been enlisted to start up and manage the site for the purest of reasons: He loves college basketball and wants to remain involved in it.
Faithful readers of our magazine should recognize Quinn for stories he wrote about the superb freshman classes of 2007 and 2008, the deceptively inspirational story of UTEP’s Stefon Jackson and a historical piece on the quirky former women’s powerhouse that was Immaculata College, among others. Next month, he will tell us how Villanova has defied the long odds facing non-football playing Catholic schools these days and will be aiming for its second straight Final Four appearance this season.
Every story Quinn has written for BT has been among the best in that issue. In a not-so-distant past, he would instead be covering one of the major programs for a major metro newspaper.  Instead, he lost his job when the Philadelphia-based The Bulletin folded last June.
With Quinn’s help, we’ll become your one-stop shopping center for college basketball news and a place you’ll come to visit daily.
We hope you’ll also become a regular reader of BT the Magazine – either the print version or our newly developed digital edition – if you aren’t already.  You can subscribe to either by going to our other website at www.basketballtimes.com.
Welcome to Basketball Times Online.  From here on, we’ll be checking in with you on a daily basis.

John Akers, Editor
Basketball Times