“Start where you are. Use what you have.
Do what you can.”

Most good ideas happen organically without clever foresight or dedicated planning.  Born from circumstance meeting opportunity, these germs of creation seemingly fall out of the sky and force us to re-arrange our short and long-term pathways as they fester in our hearts and blossom under sunlight. In many ways, these flashpoints choose us rather than us choosing them, and we’re the chosen conduit to seek their terminal velocity.  Tennis great Arthur Ashe eloquently summed up these moments of purpose, but Painter Bob Ross went a different route and defined these milestones as “Happy Accidents” — occasions where an ugly duckling given proper attention can turn into a swan.  The genesis and maturation of UDPride over the last 25 years is perhaps a cocktail of both Ashe’s wisdom and Ross’s humility.  The canvas is a never-ending arc of self-reflection and refinement, while wisdom is an amalgam of our environment and no brush can command itself.

Timing is Everything

The truth is there was never a plan. UDPride began life as nothing more than a personal self-tutorial in coming-of-age Internet technologies like Web sites and HTML.  The World Wide Web was still small and largely ignored, but the path forward in communication was self-evident.  As a college junior at the University of Dayton, I deemed it time well-spent to self-teach these tools alongside my class curriculum in Journalism.  More importantly however, curating a place where I could sharpen writing, language, and syntax skills and share those works with others for real-time constructive criticism proved highly beneficial. Starting a Web site was merely an exercise in job-skill development and that’s as far as my imagination allowed it to go.  I learned how to use hardware and software, build and maintain basic Web sites, design icons and graphics, publish articles and photos, oversee databases, and gain a measure of IT education along the way.  As a one-man band, it was me, myself, and I. These kernels represent the wisdom of the journey.

The happy accident soon followed.

A Journey of Changing Winds

Even “HTML” is now an industry term — though still the backbone of the Internet — that is rarely mentioned as modernization has led to a hands-off approach to code.  Other products, services, and software such as Java, animated GIFs, RealAudio, FrontPage, Macromedia, and Listservs have been replaced by fully-customizable Content Management Systems that require little technical ability to set up and publish a Web page.  It’s not all that challenging if the launching pad is present-day, but transitioning a Web site from the dawn of the Internet through multiple platforms and technologies has been Herculean at times. When a piece of software or tech reached end-of-life, it placed a doomsday clock on UDPride and forced us to migrate to newer and better platforms before the Web pages stopped loading altogether. There have been several re-inventions over the years and each one has been akin to shoving a square peg into a round hole.  Incompatible legacy web content with the “new” WWW must be reconstituted and converted. Sometimes that means making tough choices about what content to hold on to and what to let go.

Multiplicity

As I spent my junior and senior years at UD publishing articles as a one-man editorial board, word slowly got around and others took notice. Mostly Flyer fans because I concentrated nearly all of my time on UD Athletics.  The great thing about word-of-mouth and propagation is its exponentiality.  Presuming the clicks were an affirmation of the work, I started writing for others as much as myself and like most young writers made many mistakes along the way. Occasionally I read old articles from the late 1990s and cringe. Improvement was a slow climb but the platform accelerated my glidepath compared to others in my graduating class. After Bro. Raymond Fitz handed over the diploma, the next question was ‘shall I continue with the happy accident or walk away?’

I gave it another year to gauge traction while moving on to the real world with a real job and real responsibilities.  The exponentiality continued and by around 2001 it became an endeavor without a walk-away option; too many fans were invested in the product and contributing their own online discussion too. Over the next two decades, UDPride slowly transitioned from a product to a project and that’s how I still feel about it today. Products reach a completion stage while projects are never-ending revamps without a termination.  They live and breathe as long as those curating them provide the sustenance.  I have thousands of Flyer fans around the world to personally thank for that commitment, oversight, and financial investment to keep the hamster wheels turning. Servers, mastheads, galleries, articles, topics, and posts may change over time, but we’re still here pursuing the happy accident.

Three Lessons Along the Way

One additional point of “Pride” is the platform we’ve offered to UD student athletes beyond men’s basketball.  Forgotten faces for too long, they wear the Flyer uniform like all other Dayton athletic teams, trained and played just as hard, and were no less interesting or entertaining.  Special thanks to the University of Dayton for treating us as equals among the press since day one — and helping us showcase those players and coaches.

As of late 2022, we’ve re-invented ourselves once again and launched the biggest and boldest redesign in our Web site’s history.  While other leaps were planet to planet, this one is galactic and was several years in the planning stages before finally getting built and deployed. Never has there been more feature sets, interactive news, publishing tools, discussion-related bells and whistles, and social-sharing integration to ensure the vitality of UDPride and help future-proof the technology backbone orchestrating the front pages.

Projects like this shouldn’t take over three years to complete, but we’ve always been committed to the “do it once, do it right” principle.  It required long hours in the evenings and on weekends, saying no to other commitments, and revising/extending existing directions as the technology updates improved the backbone over the course of the build.  The finish line never seemed to be anywhere on the horizon — like chasing a rainbow for that pot of gold.  Taking one bite at a time however, the work finally crawled closer to the endpoint than the beginning.

Following Arthur Ashe’s words, we started at the beginning with what little we had and did our mightiest to be faithful stewards to Flyer nation.  UDPride has always been a place where friend and foe are welcome, open dialogue is encouraged, constructive criticism tolerated, and above-board behavior an expectation and not a request.

In victory.