How We Got Started

Where should I start? Well, this story actually goes back quite a ways, so it’s probably best to start at the beginning.

The 3 guys responsible for this blog: Matt, Ralph, and I, all went to elementary school in the same area of northwest New Jersey. The part of Jersey that often gets overlooked.

Matt and Ralph lived very close to each other and therefore attended the same elementary school. I, on the other hand, lived about 15 minutes away and attended a different school. When we all finally moved on to middle school, we quickly became friends, running March Madness pools and Fantasy leagues with our other friends before those things were a fundamental part of pop culture.

We’ve always liked different teams and we’ve never been shy about sharing our opinions, so there were many sports-related arguments (that part hasn’t changed much). But for the most part, every time there was a big sporting event on, we would get together and watch it. At the very least, we would have lengthy, detailed discussions about it the next day in the school cafeteria. It stayed this way pretty much through high school.

After high school, we all went our separate ways, but we always found ways to stay in touch and meet up during school breaks. In the summers it was like nothing ever changed, same sports, same opinions (some completely ridiculous: Darko should have been taken over LeBron, Nick Harper’s wife robbed the Colts of a Super Bowl ring in 2005, etc).

When college was over, we all came back to the same part of Jersey we grew up and decided to create a sports blog. The idea was to make a place where we could share our sports opinions with the public, and hopefully convince the public to join in the discussion.

The blog, SnatchSports.com, launched in October 2008. We worked on the site daily for about a year, adding new content and making any stylistic changes we could to make it look better. It took a little while to build up some momentum but we finally reached a point where we were getting regular comments and feedback from people we had never met. It was a great feeling.

Eventually though, it came to a point where we all had other responsibilities to deal with. We knew we couldn’t devote the amount of time and effort the site needed, so we put it on hold for awhile. At times, there were talks of getting back into the blogosphere (hence the short-lived Big East basketball blog The Real Sweet 16), but again, other responsibilities got in the way.

In June 2010, Matt decided it was the right time to get back in. After convincing Ralph and I to get back on board, we decided that a name-change would be the best way to celebrate our new beginning. In July 2010, thenewjerseyboys.com was launched as a forum for baseball and football discussion and opinions. To learn more about the site’s focus, check out the About the Site tab.

And feel free to offer up your own opinions/analysis/feedback on anything we write. That’s what this is all about. Enjoy.

The Jersey Boys