Let's See How This Goes...

By: Garrett Zatlin

Our PA Alumni deserve more attention.

Not just the guys in D1, but D2, D3, and NAIA as well. Heck, even college club runners deserve some love (looking at you Evan Hatton).

I've been with Etrain for over two years now and it has been an outstanding experience. I never thought when I first joined that we would have a professional runner like Craig Lutz reach out and help promote the blog. I never thought that a random prediction article would make the front page of LetsRun. I never thought we would have national champions follow us on Twitter. All of this just from having fun and writing a few articles.

But sometimes, I have to be honest with myself. Our audience is heavily Pennsylvania based and the most read posts in the NCAA section are typically the ones discussing PA alumni. Our readers care more about how Ned Willig is doing compared to how some Oklahoma State guy got 6th at nationals when he was projected to get 2nd.

And quite frankly, I don't blame them! Our alumni are simply more relevant. These are guys we grew up watching, competed against, and read about in Etrain's articles.

After thinking about this for nearly two months, I've decided that I will be shifting the focus of my writing for the blog towards our PA alumni. There are so many guys that I simply don't know. They deserve to get more attention. How did I not know that SRU's Ryan Thompson ran 4:05 this season? How would I have known that All-American Jaryd Flank was a PA alum if Jarrett and Fox didn't point it out to me? The list goes on.

But that's not it...

We still have a solid amount of readers from outside of the state. Readers from Boston, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and so on come to Etrain for content about NCAA distance running. Completely eliminating that focus and only benefitting the PA readers would be a bit unfair to those people in those cities.

And that's why I thought it may be a good time to experiment.

I have decided to launch my own website! It's a site that will have pretty much the same content you see here along with a few other new things that I wanted to try out. I've always wanted to start a project like this and I think now may be the best opportunity. So here it is! Expect the site to launch next week...

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