Hoffer Goes Out On His Own

Ok, it's been a minute.

I took a little break to catch up on other stuff (Spoiler: I did not get caught up on anything), but too much has happened so I'm back with another newsletter.

First off, the big news:

Last month, the new ownership group in charge of Varsity Maine decided to shut down the print version of the Forecaster, which put the sports editor, Michael Hoffer, out on the street. Hoffer has been a southern Maine fixture for years, legendary for his game stories that often stretch past 5,000 words. But the times, they are a-changing and the newspaper industry is struggling, to put it nicely.

Thankfully, he didn't stay down for long.

Yup, Michael Hoffer has joined the ranks of journalists with newsletters and you absolutely should subscribe. It's only a matter of time before he has more subscribers than I do.

In a media landscape that's a complete mess, there's a lot to be said for controlling your own destiny, even if it can be a little scary.

Best of luck to Hoffer. He's going to crush it.

In other news, the coaching carousel is in full swing.

Todd was (I think) the first coach I didn't already know to say nice things about the site, which was incredibly validating back in the day.

We also have to former podcast guests who are changing sidelines.

Steve Carey was an assistant at CMCC and now gets to take over his own program at UMA. Best of luck!

You can check out Steve's podcast episode here.

Finally, Noble coach John Morgan is moving to the college ranks.

This will be a huge test for a Noble program that resurrected itself under Morgan in the last couple of years. John came on the podcast a year ago to talk about the work that went into turning that program around.

The other big news is Cooper Flagg's tourney run, which went pretty well.

Sure, we all wished he could have won the whole thing, but he was awesome the whole way until a Peter Webb All-Star got involved.

But seriously, he was the best player on the floor in every game and I don't think it was ever in doubt.

It'd be nice to win it all, but ultimately it was great to see him excel on the biggest stage. Again.

Up next is the NBA Draft, where he'll undoubtably be the #1 pick. Do you have a preference on who wins the lottery? I'm kind of hoping Utah gets it and Danny does the Celtics a solid in a couple of years.

After a long delay, I've brought back the merch store with a couple of new designs.

First up is the "Cooper Dunked on Me" design.

Was it ideal to get dunked on a couple of years ago? Nope. But it's certainly less terrible now, even a point of pride.

You can get yours here:

And there's also this design of the Maine high school basketball greats.

These are all people we know by their first names and already people are mad at who I omitted. You've gotta draw a line somewhere and I went with D1 as a cutoff (sorry Raymond Alley). Feel free to put whoever else I missed in the comments. JP Estrella? Nick Mayo? TJ Caouette? Joe Harrington?

Anyway, there's a number of things you can buy. T-shirts. Stickers. Coffee mugs. You get the idea.

This week on the podcast, I'm joined by Erik Atwell of the Penobscot Bay Press. Erik was a screenwriter in Hollywood who found himself in Maine and with no sportswriting experience, applied to a sports reporter job posting. A couple of days later, he was covering a soccer Regional Final.

Maine's own Chad Finn has a nice piece on Drew Carter's plans to run the Boston Marathon.

And if we're talking about the Boston Marathon, that means Spring Sports are around the corner!