It’s impossible to believe that I’ve already been doing this for a year.

One year ago today, I sat at the dining room table and clicked the glowing Launch button on a very hastily and poorly constructed website. With Mac Miller’s “Party On Fifth Ave” playing in the background, a place for me to continue a passion I discovered in high school was born.

I had just graduated high school, and my outlet for writing had left when I did. For two and a half years I had contributed to The Foreword, Allderdice High School’s entirely student-run paper.

It was there, with the freedom to write about whatever I wanted and the ability to ditch the middle and high school essay writing format, that I learned I actually had a very deep passion for writing about sports. I became the Sports Editor in my junior year and carried that title up until graduation day.

I had written thousands upon thousands of words, and published the most articles in the paper’s history. But I felt I was losing a piece of myself when that cap and gown arrived in the mail.

I continued writing until the very last day. My last real piece, which was about Pirates reliever Dauri Morta, was published on June 15th. I was encouraged by the site’s then Editor-in-Chief, Gabriella, to write a farewell, which went up on June 26th.

It was in that farewell letter that I hinted about wanting to continue what I had been doing for the latter half of my high school career. However, I didn’t really have a concrete answer in mind. Over the next few weeks, I began to consider more and more the idea of starting my own blog.

Some generous seed money given to me by my uncle sent me on my way to design the world’s worst looking website.

I had written some full-length articles before the site officially launched, which is why some of the very first posts here are dated before July 7th, 2023.

It’s actually funny for me to look back on how different the site looked back then. If you couldn’t tell, I’m not naturally good with technology. I just barely passed the coding class in high school I took, and with a limited understanding of how to build anything online, I did…well, what I could.

At the time I first launched it, I cared a lot less about what the interface looked like. I was just ecstatic that I had a place on the wild world known as the internet to put my thoughts, ideas, and occasional real-world coverage on.

Perhaps I was incredibly naive to the challenges that starting up your own website can present. That excitement faded into disheartenment as the summer went by and frequently I saw zeros across the board. Maybe an article would get a click, but in most cases, they wouldn’t.

I had to contend with a very crowded sports landscape in Pittsburgh. Don’t get me wrong, that is a lovely thing for this city. But if you’re somebody like me, who is trying to break into things, that’s a rather large challenge.

In most cases, everybody is very friendly to one another in this realm, and I have never had a bad experience with anybody in this field. But we’re all competing for the same eyeballs, and I was at a severe disadvantage, having no real name recognition and no real online presence.

With time, things started to pick up ever so slightly in the fall. Maybe it wasn’t as swift as I would have liked, but numbers did start looking up. All I really wanted was to get my name out there as I started college and hoped to really build up some momentum.

I had a decision to make: did I want to focus more on trying to build this website further and expand my own content? Or did I want to focus on trying to parlay my work into a gig with a more established company?

That decision was made rather easy for me when I had reached out to several papers in the Pittsburgh area and heard crickets in response.

I perfectly understood; I’m sure I’m not the only person who has sent that kind of email to those editors, and I featured no professional experience of any kind.

That didn’t lessen the sting, though.

That’s not to mean that’s not a path I’m not still interested in, but it was not an opportunity that existed for me. What did exist for me, however, was Fifth Avenue, and I had a new found resolve to continue working the way I had been for a number of months.

I was in a position that, as long as something was published every day, I got clicks. While the high of seeing people actually read my work was (and still is) indescribable, that cycle quickly turned into a curse for me.

Admittedly, some days I wasn’t putting my best work out there in the name of staying consistent and getting something out there every single day. It was exhausting, but I felt the momentum ever so slowly starting to grow, and I feared all my progress being wiped away again by an off day.

I had seen that movie over and over again during the summer and early fall, and I was sick of seeing the same ending.

All of those articles are still up in the archives, but I hope you would agree the quality is a little better now than it was then.

From the start of fall until Christmas Day, I had published something every single day. A streak that was well into triple digits was only mercilessly broken by the holidays. I told myself I had to take a break, and after taking off the week between Christmas and New Years, I got back into the swing of things with a new perspective.

Since that streak had already been broken, there was no pressure to continue it and whatever perceived momentum accompanied it. It allowed me to focus more on getting work out there that I was more proud of sharing with an incredibly small sector of the internet.

As the winter turned into the spring, the views did start to come in, organically. It was a very exciting time, and it inspired me to keep up the work and stick with this thing longer.

Perhaps I have always been looking at it the wrong way, but I’ve always felt a hell of a lot more motivated when I knew that what I was writing was actually going to be seen by somebody, anybody. Now that it was regularly happening, I felt a lot more excitement every time I opened up my computer.

I did the best I could to maintain that audience while still also trying to focus on the stresses of college. I didn’t do a great job balancing; I probably spent too much time focusing on Fifth Avenue, but it provided me with a mental break from the hardships that college was giving me.

Once my first year officially ended, I dedicated as much of my impending summer to writing as I could. It felt like a real opportunity to make some sort of impression, and the baseball season getting into full swing presented me with at least one topic almost daily to discuss.

And that sort of brings me to now, staying up way too late at night writing this the night before the one year anniversary of this website.

In some ways, it feels like this all started last week. In others, it feels like I’ve been doing this forever. It’s been a crazy journey, one that I felt some incredible highs and lows as I’ve gone through it.

But it’s something I wouldn’t trade for anything. I’m finally at a place where I am confident in my writing abilities and what this website can do to bring attention to my work.

I probably won’t ever be on the level of the Trib, or the Post Gazette, or any other deeply established outlet in this city.

There are so many quality outlets here that have far more personnel and far more access to teams and players than I will possibly ever have. I watch the games on tv or pay to go to the game just like any other fan.

But to see this journey take me as far as it has already has truly been the experience of a lifetime. To have any actual reader base is something I couldn’t have even imagined not that long ago.

To anyone who has ever read a single thing on Fifth Avenue Sports, I want to personally thank you for checking out this page. Your support is so immensely appreciated by me.

To anyone who is a paid subscriber of Fifth Avenue Sports, words cannot possibly share my gratitude that you would be willing to spend some of your hard earned money to support this page. Whether it’s a thousand subscribers or just one, the fact that anyone out there would be willing to pay anything to read work I did just makes me…speechless, honestly.

Thank you all, so much, for everything. I’m so excited to keep going.