City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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The countdown is on. 

Today — Tuesday, Sep. 28, 2021 — marks the beginning of the six-week countdown to the 2021-22 NCAA college basketball season, the first day that Division I programs can begin their more in-depth practice regimens to ramp up for the winter. 

Typically, this is the day that CoBL releases its City 6 Preseason Awards as well as sets the schedule for our preseason coverage to come over the next month and a half, counting down until the season begins. 

Unfortunately, this year, things are going to look a little different, and I’m here to ask for your patience and your understanding as we gear up back to the CoBL we were in the past.

For those unaware, I’m currently 60% of the way through graduate school, working on my Master of Science in Communications degree at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. It’s a program that started back in January, and if I finish ‘on time,’ will end this upcoming March. (Whether or not I'll finish on time or postpone my final course until later in 2022 remains to-be-determined).

While I’m thrilled to be learning new skills, polishing some old ones, and earning a degree that will both help me with CoBL while also allowing me to perhaps adjunct a college course or two, there’s no getting around the fact that this program is a massive drain on my time and energy. And it’s on the quarter system, meaning that just while most college students were just getting to campus in August and starting their semesters, the last few weeks have been full of semester-ending projects and papers, which obviously had to be top priority.

(Speaking of priorities: I also got married last year, and while I have a very understanding and supportive wife when it comes to CoBL, I don’t want to be an absent partner, literally or figuratively. Too many people in sports seem to have the mindset that the job comes first, and while I do love this job and this website, I’m determined not to run it in a manner where I’m neglecting the woman I’ve pledged to spend my life with.)

Add into that the events we’ve been running this fall, and there hasn’t been nearly enough time as I would have liked to plan and begin to execute some kind of college and high school preview plan at the time when I normally would have. In the past, that would have stressed me out of my mind in a constant attempt to be perfect, but I’m trying this year to remind myself not to expect the universe, and good things can (and will) still happen.

CoBL didn’t work the first time, in part, because I tried to be perfect. It’s an unrealistic standard, and the constant pressure of social media and competition to cover every story or every offer, every visit, it all led to our downfall. I’m determined not to let that happen again.

So, all that being said — there will still be college preview content. I’m putting together our preseason City 6 awards, and they’ll be out early next week, which is when we’ll start running our season preview content. Once those are finalized, I’ll turn my attention to the Division I programs, set up some interviews and get those stories rolling.

In the meanwhile, the CoBL contributors are hard at work on more than two dozen different high school previews that are already in the works, and we have plans to run dozens more between October and November. That includes girls and women’s stories, though we’re not going to be issuing awards to a realm we haven’t yet covered prior to this summer, prior to having actual expertise on the subject.

So yes, there will be plenty of preseason coverage, including a preseason hub page (currently still in development). There will be player features and team breakdowns, small-college coverage, and more. It just won’t come out in any particular order or by any particular day. I’m not going to promise that we’ll do it alphabetically, as I typically enjoy doing, or that it won’t all come out in the last two weeks before the season begins.

All I know at the moment is that I have a new quarter starting Thursday, with a (hopefully) easier workload to come over the next three months than the one I had the previous three, which I was told is the most difficult portion of the program.

Thankfully, next fall, I’ll be fully focused on CoBL, and we can get back to a full six weeks of previews. Until then, I’ll be doing the best I can to balance everything, keep the site going, and provide the highest-quality coverage possible. 

Thanks for understanding.

        - Josh Verlin