One of the advantages to having a personal lacrosse blog is that I can write an article about myself. It’s rare, but here’s one of them.
It’s standard at the end of a year to go over the year and think about special things that happened during the previous 12 months. I had a few, the best of which were my wife’s graduation from teacher’s college and the birth of my niece Elizabeth. But this is a lacrosse blog, so let’s take a look at some of my more memorable lacrosse-related events from 2012.
January 16: My first article for IL Indoor was published. It was very exciting to see my name on an article on that site, which I’ve been reading since it was NLL Insider. IL Indoor has a +/- voting system on each article, and this article has a +4 rating with 14 votes. After crunching the numbers (half the difference is the number of down-votes), we find that nine people read the article and then clicked 
while five people clicked 
. To the nine: thanks! To the five: Sorry to disappoint, and hopefully you felt that things improved throughout the season. Note that I have no idea how many people read the article without clicking anything but I would guess that it’s the vast majority.
February 24: My first interview, done over email with Teddy Jenner, is published. With apologies to Delta Airlines, Teddy loves to talk lacrosse, and it shows.
February 26: The All-Star Game in Buffalo. This was my second NLL All-Star game (I was also at the one in Toronto in 2006), and despite the fact that it wasn’t a “normal” lacrosse game (almost no penalties, very little defense, pretty much no hitting), I enjoyed it.
April 27: My interview with future NLL Hall of Famer Steve Toll is published. This was my first “real” interview as it was done over the phone, and not over email like Teddy’s.
September 7: I attended Game 1 of the Mann Cup. The Langley Thunder defeated the Peterborough Lakers 13-12 in a bit of a surprising game. I don’t really follow the MLS or WLA that closely, but everything I’d read said “Lakers in a cakewalk”. That first game (and the second game which Langley also won) proved them wrong. The Lakers did win the next four to win it all, but it wasn’t as easy as many said it would be. We were sitting only a couple of rows back from the glass, in the row behind John Grant’s sister and her family. At one point, someone (not Grant) tried an over-the-shoulder shot but missed the net. I said “Who do you think you are, John Grant?”. She smiled.
October 1: The NLL Entry Draft. This was my first time at an NLL event that wasn’t a game, and I found it fascinating to see bits of the “inner workings” of the league.
October 31: My only non-Moneyballers article on IL Indoor was published, a story about Calgary’s Scott Ranger and how he deals with Type 1 diabetes. I’m very proud of this article, which received 43 votes, 41 of which were 
‘s.
December 18: The Toronto Rock’s first-ever town hall meeting. Checking out the Rock dressing room at the new Toronto Rock Athletic Complex was very cool. I also asked a question which both Colin Doyle and Garrett Billings answered.
NLL Chatter 