The appointed hour is finally here. After 15 years of service to telling the story of the Mid-American Conference, the book will finally close on Hustle Belt.
Our editor-in-chief found out via phone call right before Super Bowl weekend, as the staff was drafting up articles about MAC-affiliated players in the Big Game and putting together concrete plans to cover the upcoming NFL Draft in April— not knowing what was to come. The following Monday, Alan Rucker, our editor-in-chief, texted me the information
and we informed the staff of what happened together. The same night, myself, Alan and Steve Helwick—a long-time partner who came in around the same time I did—all drafted the letter which wound up being our public announcement.
This letter—my 1,527th entry on the site— will be my last at Hustle Belt. Overall, I wrote or had a hand in publishing over 15,502 pieces in 12 years. The phone call to Alan was a bullet to the heart. It made several of our site contributors cry— myself included. Even now, as I try to find the right words to end on, I find my eyes misting up on occasion, blurring the screen into an unidentifiable grey smudge. My throat seizes and I have to turn away, still coming to grips with how quickly everything has happened.
There’s no good to be had in expressing our frustrations with the situation. Even if we don’t get to cover the NFL Combine and Draft periods, the final departure of Northern Illinois or the emergent relationship between Sacramento State and the rest of the MAC over the next few months as the Hustle Belt you have all come to love, there is nothing to be done about it. The story is written. All must come to an end eventually.
Instead, I write about the behind-the-scenes of our situation because even in this final hour, we’re still not ready to leave. There are humans behind all these words written on this page. Hours, days, weeks, even months or years of thought behind every sentence published. The life experiences of every one of our writers bleed onto the page or through the frame. Our personalities become apparent even in something as simple as a game recap.
All of us are, in some way, affected by this sundowning, and in such a cruel environment as the one we’re in right now, it is often lost on casual observers the impact a shutdown like this can have on us as people.
The walls will always close in on writers; it is a terribly thankless industry which has chewed up and spit out so many bright minds and pens. Even I have to admit there have been times, suffering from the pressure and the burnout of trying to carry the burden, where I drafted a retirement letter in my own secret notepad file, thinking “this is the last game I cover.”
We know Hustle Belt will be buried in the ground with our sister blogs. We’ll eventually be forgotten as a pioneer of an increasingly alien Internet monoculture which has transformed wildly even in the last five years— much less over nearly 20. Our words will be used as training by language-learning models with innocent-sounding names, commodifying our passion at pennies to the dollar. We’re told it’s inevitable, that we should get used to it.
Even still, we try. We try because writing— for all of its warts, worries and concerns— is one of the most rewarding things a human can possibly do. The craftsmanship, the research, the constant revision and evolution, the building of relationships… it’s all emotionally centering. Finding the “money quote” or getting the random comment about what you wrote is a feeling that is euphoric. It is both validation and confirmation that you are a positive addition to the world. Your words mean things to people, even the mundane ones.
Our announcement earlier this month gave people an opportunity to share their love and appreciation for our little blog in a landscape which again and again, day after day, tells us it’s worthless to try and continue forward. We made ourselves vulnerable to you when drafting that letter.
At the end of the day, we did it all for you.
We know the MAC will never generate the amount of traffic other conferences do. We know that the people who read our work are either heavily invested in their alma mater or they’re stopping by to check in on Tuesday night matchups. That’s perfectly fine. That’s how we’ve always liked it. Never once did we look around and dread where we stood.
Hustle Belt is, was and always will be here for you. Because we are you.
We went to the same schools. Haunted the same haunts. We watched the same games, appreciated the same faces. We embraced the memes, we advocated for good causes, we strove to instill pride in the community.
We were successful, even if the metrics said we weren’t.
Now, as we embark on the epilogue of this sprawling work, we look back in appreciation. It is, truly, unbelievable for this little blog to have ever gotten this exposure in the sports media space. A veritable fever dream, even.
I remember, as a young aspirant broadcaster looking to talk about Central in 2014, we all had to communicate in the ol’ fashioned way: electronic mail. Hundreds— if not thousands— of missives about a wide variety of topics, all in the same thread (assuming someone didn’t accidentally break it.)
This was in the era before workspace apps got popular, so we had to navigate our passion into effort even though the issues. It was fun! A true crash course in this new media age where the Internet hadn’t yet settled into its modern routines.
A subsequent move to a new space helped us re-organize, and after that, our sense of professionalization started to emerge. It was a necessary change for growth; we had survived our adolescent stages and found the niche we wanted to occupy and took immediate advantage.
We get to do a lot of cool things in our time with SB Nation. Dozens of games attended as credentialed media, several media days, countless weekly press conferences, tons of radio and podcast appearances, a surprise ESPN appearance, three different podcasts, an (attempt) at a Twitch channel and attached eSports vertical, a collaboration with Homefield Apparel in their infancy…
But one of my personal favorite things we every got to do was a very simple collaboration with a radio station in Ohio. Every year, they publish a magazine previewing all the local teams, from high school to college, and myself and a few others with the site had the privilege of previewing the MAC teams. I still have a physical copy of the first magazine we featured in to this day.
That is exactly that kind of loyalty to the soil we hoped to foster through Hustle Belt. We have always been exactly where we were meant to be; we are, by nature, provincial.
So, at the end of it all, how do you come to grips with leaving when you’re not ready to go?
There are plenty of books, films, shows and games that end with an air of mystery and uncertainty. Endings which lack resolution aren’t always bad. If anything, it leaves room to think about the story as a whole and internalize the lessons it tries to teach you. (Trust me, I’ve thought about the end[s] of Neon Genesis Evangelion a ton, and it’s been nearly three years since I last saw it for the first time.)
Our ending will be no different.
Even if we’re not sure what’s ahead yet, at the least, we’re free from the doubts now. We choose the path from here. We’ll always be looking towards our guiding light, our raison d’etre.
We have suffered a sort of caramel pain over the last few weeks; the realization the end was near wound up being as empowering as it was debilitating. Where all that energy goes to now is in our hands. As of this column’s publication, we are still working out what our future will look like. Whatever that vision turns out to be will take time to implement, but as long as we remember where we’re from and who we represent, we’ll always take steps forward.
That’s what it means to hustle, after all.
