I Got My Pride

BEVERLY HILLS (MI) — I don’t know about you, but having to live without UD Pride for about 36 hours earlier this week, right after the Northern Kentucky exhibition game, really got me to thinking. What if, in the words of that noted statesman Fred Sanford, this was “the big one, Elizabeth?” What if Chris decided, screw it, I don’t need this aggravation anymore, I’m done? What if somebody stole the UD Pride server hamsters from their cages so they couldn’t scamper in place on their little exercise wheels and keep the site up and running? What if the sun didn’t come up in the morning?

Having been thru several previous UD Pride site outages before, I realized that the worst possible thing that any of us could do was to keep trying to get the site to load up while Chris was in the middle of trying to repair it. Of course, that didn’t stop me from periodically clicking on UD Pride in my list of favorites… watching the indicator lights slowly progress… stop…and then getting an error message. I emailed Chris and offered my condolences, while tiptoeing around the question on everyone’s mind:

When would the site be back up?

Sometime on Wednesday I tried to fire this mutha up yet again and was greeted by the familiar red and blue Flyer guy logo that Chris commissioned last year and all was right with the world.

If you took the time to read the thread on the message board about the outage you already know the answer to the question “how do we prevent this from happening again?”

Join Pride Plus.

UD Pride is the website of record for Flyer Basketball opinion and conversation. Check the counter on the home page: we are nearly 3,000 strong in terms of registered users here at UD Pride. And yet only 75 of those almost 3,000 are Pride Plus members. Matt Schwade at FlyerHoops.com does a great job, but he has a different model. He has a fraction of our members paying a subscription fee and has the Rivals.com network backing him up. Chris does this all by his lonesome.

Think what it was like for those 36 hours earlier this week and then, if you are financially able, send the man $49 to keep the hamsters running.

It’ll be money well spent.

Like most of the things I write here, the title of this piece “I Got My Pride” is a double entendre. It refers not only to the return to life of the website, but to my unprecedented, unbridled, unbelievable optimism about the upcoming Flyer basketball season…and beyond.

What makes me so proud?

This guy for sure:

http://www.daytondailynews.com/dayton-sports/university-of-dayton-flyers/wright-proud-of-opening-local-pipeline-to-ud-398971.html

Definitely this gentleman:

http://www.daytondailynews.com/dayton-sports/university-of-dayton-flyers/what-does-uds-gregory-have-to-say-about-his-5-newest-recruits-397215.html

Watching this dude blossom:

http://www.daytondailynews.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/throughthearch/entries/2009/11/10/flyers_next_star_chris_johnson.html

This young fella:

http://www.oakhillhoops.com/2009/11/juwan-statens-diary-5-staying-strong/

And the thought of him doing one of these in a Flyer (not Auburn) uniform:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y_KdLQrKGg&feature=player_embedded

This guy: